[JacobHempel]

Good evening!

My name is Jacob and I'm currently a sophomore in college. I'm in an undergraduate research program and my mentor gave me a project to work on that I will talk about at an AIAA symposium this December. The research he's given me, however, is quite honestly above my head, because I've never taken a fluids class (but this is how research works: you tackle a problem that's difficult to solve by gathering information).

As a lot of us know, the learning curve for OpenFOAM is quite steep; the fact I've never worked with C++ programming also tremendously hurts. So I am having a lot of issues on figuring out how to work with OpenFOAM in general. I understand the basic concepts with the files, and how there's three directories (0, constant, and system), and that 0 describes the conditions at t=0... But after that, I'm pretty lost.

My project is simple: simulate a sphere of radius 0.01m at mach 10 speed in an argon gas flow... Well, although it is simple, it is very difficult for me! This is basically what my mentor set me up with. Everything else is up to me to figure out on my own. Afterwards, he eventually told me to use the conditions found in Thomas Hauser and Jeffery Allen's paper on dsmcFoam... Hauser's paper mentioned "a mean free path of 0.0068m... a domain of 9200 unstructured tetrahydral cells... time step of 6.5E-7... sphere wall temperatures were set to 1000K..."

So... My question is: how does OpenFOAM work? Does anybody know how to use dsmcFoam solver? Most importantly, is there any advice you can give me as to where I can find information on these topics? I've searched endlessly (hence why I'm finally posting about it). But perhaps I've searched in all the wrong places...

Thank you, and I apologize for this wall of text!
-Jacob Hempel