Let’s Talk about Openfoam!
Several of my viewers and subscribers have asked me to start making OpenFoam Tutorials, so this is why I am starting this new series.
The Purpose will be to show you how to operate the OpenFoam solver with the minimum of hassle and I’ll try to teach you some knowledge about CFD Simulation along the way, brushing off my own dusty CFD skills ;-)
But first…
What is OpenFoam?
Openfoam is currently the leading free and open-source solver for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).
It belongs to the Openfoam foundation and it is distributed under a GPL License
Website of Openfoam: http://openfoam.org
This GPL License gives you the freedom to redistribute the software and it garantees that the usage will remain free.
Now, you might know that I like very much open-source software, as I teach several of them on my blog and on Youtube.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Open-Source
The main advantage of course of open-source software is that it is free, right?
- It’s good for students who do not have access to enterprise software
- It’s good for small companies who have good engineers
I’d like to actually emphasise another point as well
The disadvantage of Open-source is that it is rather difficult to use.
The software is generally pretty “Raw” and many of what you would consider like obvious for enterprise software like having a GUI to import and modify a geometry for example is not necessarily provided.
So… You have to be willing to go into an adventure with Open-source software
- You need to have some good engineering skills about the physics of course
- But you need also to know about Computers a minimum and especially Linux.
If you do not have a fear panic of all of that, you can start and go forward.
You might even learn quite a bunch of useful skills along the way that will make you a better engineer ;-)
How to Install Openfoam on windows and Linux
In this video, I will teach you how to install OpenFoam!
I’ll talk both about Linux and Windows
Then in the next videos, I’ll go over some tutorials with you and I will try to comment as much as possible so you understand what I am doing.
Next Articles you might be interested to read:
- Learning Basic Terminal Commands and Workspaces in Linux Ubuntu 16.04
- Installing Linux Ubuntu 16.04 on VirtualBox
If you like this kind of articles and if this is useful for you, please let me know in the comments!
I read every comment I get and I try to answer the questions as best as I can also ;-)
Happy New Year 2021 and Stay Safe!
Cyprien “Getting into uncharted Openfoam territory” Rusu
Hi Cyprien,
It was very useful video tutorial, how install OpenFOAM on linux. From my side I have two points:
From my perspective the WSL (Windows subsystem for Linux) on Windows 10 works fantastic, and if you have a problem during compilation/installation of Ubuntu or OpenFOAM on win10, please send me a error and I believe that we are able to resolve them.
Second thing – I highly recommend create aliases so for in your basrhc file. For future I think it is best way how to be 100 % sure that which version of OpenFOAM you use.
Thanks for your comment Josef!
I also wanted WSL to work, that’s why i tried a very long time… I took me several days to fix the WSL2 installation and it was finally working. Then the day after, windows did an update and it wasn’t working again… So I just decided to try another way. I lost enough time for now and I will try maybe in a few months hoping it will stabilise.
About the Alias, I have done that ;-) (At the end of the video I am showing how to do it)
Hi I’ve found your site and glad to be able to ask this question as I don’t see any info on the windows cross-compiled version of OF.
I see there is an OF exe and can be downloaded here.
Doesn’t this mean you don’t need to compile and so don’t need Ubuntu to run under windows?
Or am I missing something?
No one uses this windows native version. Can you explain why not? Is it limited? is there any tutorials existing for following this type of OF installation?
This windows version is pretty old (OpenFoam version 4 I think) so many of the OpenFoam examples changed so much that you will have many difficulties afterwards…
If you are in windows, your best bet now is either to install OpenFoam in the WSL 2.0 (Ubuntu for Windows) or to install it with Docker (Windows Professional only) – See my article on this blog