[hjasak]

Dear All,

I have been invited to deliver a keynote lecture at

CFD2009: The 7th International Conference on CFD in the Minerals and Process Industries - Melbourne 9-11 Dec 2009

http://www.cfd.com.au/cfdconf/

Since Australia is a long way away , I would like to use this opportunity for follow up the conference with some events and meetings in Australia. I would be grateful if you could please let me know about OpenFOAM activities in Australia (both academic and commercial) and if you would like to meet up and organize some events with the local OpenFOAM community (present work, set up open forum sessions and similar). This may also be an opportunity to set up a "local" interest group in line with the one in eg. Germany and Denmark, or a Special Interest Groups as hosted on the Wiki.

Please let me know if you are interested to help me plan the schedule - I guess finding my E-mail address won't be hard.

Hrv

[gcollecutt]

Hrvoje,

BMT WBM has been working with the developers at OpenCFD to create coal dust combustion functionality within OpenFOAM. This work is being funded primarily by the Australian coal industry research council with the end goal being to develop the ability to simulate coal dust explosions in underground coal mines, and the active suppression thereof. Ambitious work I know! We should consider submitting an abstract for this work to CFD2009.

We have also used OF to model water and slurry flows in various process situations, and our Water and Environment group is keen on using it for small scale (near field) environmental modelling applications.

The open source nature of the software has been fantastic for us when working on the coal dust combustion model - with the higher levels of dust loading (higher than might be seen for example in a power station boiler) Fluent would crash and we could never see exactly why, let alone fix it. The other fantastic thing about OF is of course that it is free! We are using a 64 CPU blade cluster to run the coal dust combustion models. I shudder to think what that would cost with Fluent.

As fas as I know there has not been significant take up of the software at university level within Queensland, but I cannot say for the other states. I believe it is being used by other Australian industries - I've seen 'OpenFOAM experience' listed as desirable in job advertisements!

Perhaps we can meet in Melbourne.

Greg.