[victorz]

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!

[-mAx-]

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.