New free graphical CFD solver: Civil-CFD
 

I wrote a simple 3D CFD solver that is intended for civil engineering (water resources and municipal water/wastewater) applications. Meshing, case development, simulation and visualization can all be performed from the included graphical interface. Exporting results to Paraview is also supported.

The software is available here: http://civilcfd.github.io

Civil-CFD solves the Navier-Stokes equations in 3 dimensions. The VOF method is used for free surface flows. The k-E turbulence model is also used. There are no advanced sub-models at this time for sediment, moving mesh, etc.

Civil-CFD is free software released under the GPL. A 64-bit Windows binary is provided, or it can be built from source in Windows or Linux using CMake.

This is the first general release. Please keep in mind that results have not been validated by physical modeling or comparisons to commercial codes. This is a personal project I started out of interest in CFD and I hope you might find it useful.

Thank you for sharing your software :)

I downloaded and installed the binaries but when loading the bump example, if I try to navigate to mesh or geometry the program crashes with a windows message "program stoped working". Windows 7 pro

Also I wanted to ask you how you built petsc libraries for native windows, some time ago I was looking to do it but couldn't find a true way. Would you have any link or reference ?

Thank you :)

May I also ask what kind of meshing is used? Is it cut-cell on a uniform background mesh?

Thanks

If it is crashing when you open the mesh or geometry window, then there is some problem with initializing the QVTKOpenGLWidget that displays the 3D visualizations. Can you check if there is a vtk_log.txt file in the Bump example folder? Does it have a line that reads "GLEW could not be initialized"?

If this is the problem, then you likely have an old version of OpenGL installed, and this needs to be upgraded to run this software. What graphics hardware are you using? I have this same problem if I try to run it in VirtualBox since it only supports OpenGL 1.1.

Are you able to run the latest version of Paraview? The latest Paraview release also uses QVTKOpenGLWidget and likely won't work either if Civil-CFD has this issue. Older versions of Paraview won't have this problem since they use the depreciated QVTKWidget.

As for PetSc, I find it works quite well in Windows. There are build instructions for Windows on the official website:https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/docume...n.html#windows. The instructions are a bit out of date as I recall, but it will work with some tinkering. There is also a blog post with some additional instructions https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/hpc...sc-on-windows/. Lastly, this StackOverflow post clears up some issues: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ion-on-windows. Make sure to install the MSMPI SDK first from the Microsoft website.

Thanks!

The software defines an orthogonal 3D mesh. Each cell has a volume fraction attribute, and each face has an area fraction attribute. The meshing tool takes an STL file and cuts the orthogonal mesh to represent 3D geometry by setting these parameters. This way irregular geometries are preserved in the structured mesh.

The software only supports one large rectangular 3D mesh; however, by defining special boundaries, the user can establish specific areas of the mesh boundaries that have certain attributes (e.g. fixed velocity, hydraulic grade, or volumetric outflow). This feature allows more complex simulations to be run on a simple mesh. The included Pump Station example illustrates how this is accomplished.

Thanks!