CFD Softwares: Other than Standard Commercial ones...

Among the list of several CFD vendors / Application programs that we normally come across the internet, few programs caught my attention with respect to its user-friendly nature and ease with which it can be incorporated into a fundamental CFD curriculum.

1. EasyCFD (http://www.easycfd.net/)

Quicknote: An simple CFD software tool for the numerical simulation of two-dimensional fluid flows in a boundary fitted structured grid. (predictions like Two-Dimensional Separated Flows, Study Of Abrupt Transitions in Two-Dimensional Flows: A Singular Perturbation Approach etc can be done)

The code is mainly oriented for didactic or educational purposes, it may become a valuable tool for a first analysis in practical situations. Contact and Download available in the home page.

Some features listed in the website include

· Laminar or turbulent flow
. Conduction in solids and conjugate heat transfer ( Theory of Periodic Conjugate Heat Transfer)
· Isothermal or non-isothermal flow (Incompressible Flow and the Finite Element Method, Volume 1, Advection-Diffusion and Isothermal Laminar Flow)
. Multicomponent fluid flow (Multicomponent Flow Modeling (Modeling and Simulation in Science, Engineering and Technology))
· Steady-state or transient flow
. Transport of passive scalars (eg. smoke, Transport of passive scalars in turbulent channel flow (SuDoc NAS 1.15:89463) )
· Numerical grid generation(Geometry and Topology for Mesh Generation (Cambridge Monographs on Applied and Computational Mathematics))
. Geometry import from DXF or point data files

Pre-processing (meshing, import of files..) and post-processing (contour plots, vectorial rep,
statistical data extraction features) are nicely done.

2. FluidFlow (http://www.fluidflowinfo.com/FluidFlow/FluidFlow.asp)



original software program for the design and optimization of pipe networks, transporting compressible, incompressible, gas-liquid two phase, settling slurries or non-Newtonian fluids.



The code looks pretty effective for product is used succesfully in many diverse industries to model new and existing systems, size pipes, select boosters, controllers and other fluid equipment (Fluid Dynamics Of Industrial Equipment: Flow Distribution Design Methods).

This is a definite piece of software - designers - should be looking at!! New release information and contact info are available in the website .

3. ChannelFlow

http://www.channelflow.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

A C++ based software system for numerical analysis of the incompressible Navier-Stokes flow in channel geometries. Core idea is based on Spectral CFD algorithm for integrating NS eqns (Spectral/hp Element Methods for CFD (Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computation)) . It is based on Flexible Object oriented programming concept. Classes act as building blocks for presenting particular channel flow models, and associated data analysis.

Nice description of the code set up is avaiable in the home page.


4. Enzo (an open-source cosmological simulation code that uses an adaptive mesh)

http://lca.ucsd.edu/portal/software/enzo

an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), grid-based hybrid code (hydro + N-Body) which is designed to do simulations of cosmological structure formation (For those astro-physicists / computational /mechanical engineers !)Cosmological Inflation and Large-Scale Structure

The code - Enzo - has been parallelized using the MPI message-passing library and can run on any shared or distributed memory parallel supercomputer or PC cluster. Simulations using as many as 1024 processors have been successfully carried out on the San Diego Supercomputing Center's Blue Horizon, an IBM SP.

5. FLASH (free for non-commercial use, adaptive mesh, compressible solver for astrophysical flows)

http://flash.uchicago.edu/website/home/

Code support/mailing lists and research pages are available in the website.

Take a look at the movie based on convection simulation below (available in their website).

(http://flash.uchicago.edu/website/groups/compphys/dns_burn/movies/chaos_v01.mpg)

Other nice problems on flame propagation, burning in shear flow etc are well noted.

6. CFD Studio (Educational program to study CFD Problems)

http://www.sinmec.ufsc.br/cfd/doc/uk/uk/index.html

is an application to solve 2D CFD problems. It contains a basic mesh generator, a numeric method that solves the conservation equations and it has also a data visualization. The software uses the finite volumes method in generic coordinates. A snapshot of the website is shown here.

Suite contains:
. CFD Studio solver
. CSFL-Lib - CFD C++ classes
. CFD Mesh - 2D mesh creator from complex geometries
. CFD Grid Editor - Edit 2D simple mesh using easy click approach.
. CFD SciView - visualization of meshes, scalar, vector fields obtained by the runs.

Several emerging codes, similar to those discussed here, have already started making some good impressions among the researchers in both academia and industry with some good comparisons in the results produced (Data for Validation of Cfd Codes (Fed; Vol. 146)). Its now a matter of when would these "opensource" applications would take over the commercial ones !

I am looking for similar opensource codes for adding to my repository...kindly advice me on something that you come across..happy openSourcing !!