Fluent to OpenFOAM - good or bad?
 

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to CFD, and have been using Fluent for the past few months. I'd like to consult you guys whether switching to OpenFoam as the general purpose solver is a good idea.

The geometries I will be using may be relatively complicated, with a large number of cells.
In general, I'll be dealing with incompressible flows in the following applications:
- two phase flows/condensing flows
- flows in and around heat exchangers
- heat transfer
- porous media
- flows through fans
- pipe flows

Please, write down any ideas that might be relevant, and that will help me decide whether it is a good idea (cons and pros, what questions should I ask myself before the change, what steps should I take, etc.)

Thank you very much!

My point of view regarding incompressible flows (pipe flows >> simpleFoam solver):
We switched at the company 3 years ago (before with fluent)

pros:
*FREE!!!
*very customizable, because of open source
*full automatization possibility because of shell-scripts
*compatible with major mesher distributor (gambit for example)
*FREE!!!
*FREE!!! :) >> enables you to invest in the hardware instead of software


*Cons:
-Not really user-friendly, but who cares? because you can write automatization scripts, which allows you to skip the whole pre-processing
-Debugging will be tough at the beginning, but with experience it will be easier
-Post-processing (paraFoam, or ParaView) will be also disconcerting, but once you will understand how it works, you will consider it as a pros (and no more as a cons)
-no free-support, but you can get support from cfd-online community anyway

I am sure you will get more (technical-)opinions from other people

Since it is an OpenSource program, I would suggest you to test it, and to make some comparisons with models you already computed with Fluent.