View source for User:Hoogs/Presentation/How to use OpenFOAM

* OpenCFD have recently partnered with SGI to provide [http://www.opencfd.co.uk/training.html training courses]
** There is a [http://www.opencfd.co.uk/openfoam/doc/user.html User Guide] which is quite good
** Unfortunately at this time one of the big gaps is an advanced programmer manual
*** There is a [http://foam.sourceforge.net/doc/Guides-a4/ProgrammersGuide.pdf Programmers Guide] but it is incomplete
* There is no substitute for playing with tutorial cases and messing with the code
** Learning C++ takes time, but there are plenty of [http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/HOWTO/C++Programming-HOWTO-13.html online resources]
** Budget about 3-18 months to develop real confidence in C++, depending on how much time you have
** You need to write/modify code regularly to do this
** Understanding the OpenFOAM code arrangement is a separate exercise, and you are mostly on your own if you cannot afford the courses
*** Expect this to get easier as the user community grows just through word of mouth
*** Things have come a long away even in just the last four years!
* You do not need to compile the code to use it
** But you should anyway, at least once, takes many hours usually (large C++ code bases tend to take longer to compile than C)
** OpenCFD provide pre-compiled binaries tested in SuSE and recently, Ubuntu
*** These days any performance improvement due to local compilation rarely noticeable
* OpenFOAM is just the '''solver'''
** You need a pre- and post-processor (i.e. mesher and viewer)
*** OpenFOAM was designed as an industrial tool so it needed to interface with a wide range of pre and post processors and formats
*** Lots of converters in-built where the specifications are publicly available 
** Meshing is still "fragmented"
*** blockMesh is a native utility for simple geometries, snappyHexMesh new native hex mesher really good but not ideal
*** OpenCFD working on a very exciting auto poly mesher
** [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraview Paraview] serves most purposes, is actually better than say, Fluent post-processor