OpenFOAM: An Essential Tool for Chemical and Process Engineering - openfoam-ICL-UC/openfoam_intro_EN GitHub Wiki
OpenFOAM: An Essential Tool for Chemical and Process Engineering
What is OpenFOAM?
OpenFOAM stands for Open-source Field Operation And Manipulation. It is a C++ toolbox for developing customized programs for the numerical solution of continuum mechanics problems, prominently including computational fluid dynamics (CFD)³. Additionally, OpenFOAM includes utilities for preprocessing and postprocessing.
OpenFOAM is a free and open-source software primarily developed by OpenCFD Ltd since 2004¹. It has a broad user base in most areas of science and engineering, both in commercial and academic organizations¹.
Why is it relevant for Chemical and Process Engineering?
OpenFOAM is relevant for chemical and process engineering due to its wide range of features that can solve complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence, and heat transfer, as well as acoustics, solid mechanics, and electromagnetism¹.
In the specific field of chemical and process engineering, OpenFOAM offers functionalities for various applications⁴. These include:
- Segregated Multiphase Flows: Representation using the Volume of Fluid (VoF) method for multiple immiscible fluids, simulating interface movement, breakup, viscous and inertial forces.
- Dispersed Multiphase Flows: Euler-Euler type simulation of dispersed phases, with sub-grid scale interface modeling, heat and mass transfer. Suitable for bubble flows, steam injection, and fluidized beds, etc.
- Particles: Fully coupled Lagrangian modeling for both dispersed and dense particle flows. Simulation of combustion or spray cooling, dense fluidization, separation, and filtration devices, etc.
- Thermodynamic Modeling: Various thermodynamic and transport models, including real gas effects, liquid, and solid properties.
- Turbulence: Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations, stress closures, large eddy simulations (LES), multiphase models, and extensive boundary models.
- Heat Transfer: Conjugate heat transfer simulation in multiple fluid/solid regions. Natural convection. Coupling and boundary modeling.
- Reactions: Simulation of simple and multiphase turbulent reactive flows. This provides various approaches for combustion modeling.
These features make OpenFOAM a valuable tool for chemical and process engineers seeking to perform detailed and accurate simulations in their work⁴.
OpenFOAM allows us to contribute to the scientific and technological development of the world through the analysis of transport phenomena
In most Chemical Engineering programs, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is absent. However, as chemical engineers, we constantly deal with heat, mass, and momentum transport phenomena. One reason for the absence of CFD is that it is a very difficult skill to teach and develop. It requires deep knowledge of fluid mechanics and numerical methods. However, in many scientific and technological applications, it is noticeable that while there are many numerical solutions to complex transport phenomena problems, their analysis is absent. It is precisely this gap that we need to fill, and we can do it with the help of OpenFOAM.
Applications in Industry
OpenFOAM has an extensive set of codes to efficiently solve the momentum and continuity conservation equations in most cases of interest to Chemical Engineering. In practice, many day-to-day problems can be set up as OpenFOAM cases. While this requires caution, it is not necessary to know the details of the numerical implementation of the linear systems' solving algorithms resulting from the finite volume discretization of the governing equations. One of the objectives of this workshop is to break the barrier to the use of OpenFOAM and guide autonomous learning of this software.
Applications in Research
Novel research typically requires modeling a problem that has never been solved before. In this domain, OpenFOAM can also help as it allows reducing development effort. Specifically, it is not necessary to develop a CFD solver for a new problem, but rather, an existing solver can be selected as a starting point, and a subset of routines can be developed on top of it.
An example of this is our latest article CFD Modelling of the non-isobaric evaporation of cryogenic liquids in storage tanks, in which we have also made the code publicly available on Zenodo.
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