Geometry in OpenFoam
 

Hello everyone,

I am a new OpenFoam-user and have a lot of questions.... i read the User-guide...but still not understanding , how really openfoam works....

so...first of all .... i am interested on the geometry in OpenFoam:

I would like to understand, how OpenFoam builds the geometry..where can i find the information concerning the geometry, that i want to simulate ?
how can know....if my geometry is an air foil, a cylinder or a cavity ?

how can i import CAD-files into OpenFoam ? how can use geometries, that i drew using a CAD-software ? should i only use the stl format ?

Thanks a lot !!!!!

hey,

OpenFOAM has 2 general approaches for building geometries: blockMesh and snappyHexMesh.

BlockMesh is typically used for simple geometries, you basicaly define points and builds blocks from them. You can read this for more detailed information. http://www.openfoam.org/docs/user/blockMesh.php

Other way to generate geometry in OpenFOAM is using snappyHexMesh, it takes a stl file as input, and there's various parameters to control the quality of the resultant mesh. for more detail, read this
http://www.openfoam.org/docs/user/snappyHexMesh.php
A tutorial on snappyHexMesh is located at /tutorials/mesh/snappyHexMesh/

That should get you going

thank you :)


but how can i import CAD-files into OpenFoam ? how can i use geometries, that i drew using a CAD-software ? should i only use the stl format ?

Yah, export your geometry into stl files, and use snappyHexMesh to generate the mesh. That will require a background mesh generated using blockmesh and a file called snappyHexMeshDict in the system directory. A sample snappyHexMeshDict can be found in the tutorial link I posted earlier.