Reference-Quality Open-Source Option for Real Gas Properties in OpenFOAM
 

Dear CFD community,

My name is Ian Bell, a post-doc at the University of Liege in Belgium, and I am the primary developer of the free, open-source thermophysical property library CoolProp (http://coolprop.sf.net). You can think of CoolProp as a free, open-source alternative to NIST REFPROP. We have 110 pure and pseudo-pure fluids, more or less everything of technical interest that is in REFPROP. In most cases we implement exactly the same equations of state as REFPROP. The primary limitation of CoolProp vis a vis REFPROP is that we cannot handle mixtures in CoolProp (yet). The codebase of CoolProp is in C++, and we have already developed wrappers of CoolProp for many languages (MATLAB, python, c#, etc.), and platforms including linux, windows, and even a Raspberry PI.

Our newest contribution is a wrapper of our library for FLUENT. In principle we can (and would be happy to) build wrappers of CoolProp for other CFD packages - especially OpenFOAM as it is also open-source. I have a very solid understanding of our code, but we could use some help on the OpenFOAM side of things. Anyone want to take a stab?

Along with my collaborators Joris Degroote and Iva Papes of Universiteit Gent, Belgium, we are pleased to give you the first taste of our FLUENT wrapper. In its current form, the code is quite simple, we are still looking to hammer out an API at the FLUENT level. Consider this a proof of principle - all we do is that we calculate the density of dry air at 100 kPa and 300 K. For the moment I have just provided a copy of the coolprop sources, in the future the FLUENT wrapper will be part of the source tree that is under source control. You can check out the coolprop sources from https://github.com/ibell/coolprop

The CoolProp-FLUENT example which can be compiled to a UDF can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/sq0r7v6egz...rop2FLUENT.zip

Had I known how much difficulty you all were having with real gas properties before, I would have jumped into the fray some time ago. I guess I could do with some more publicity work on CoolProp!

All the best,
Ian

integration with Openfoam
 

respected sir
i have great respect for your work, i tried to integrate coolProp database to openFoam for latest version v2312, but i am having trouble while integrating the solver,
it is my honest, humble and sincere request for you to please integrate all the solvers (if not at least multi-phase ones in openfoam to coolProp), i am a b.tech guy and i don't have in-depth custom solver creating knowledge in openfoam yet, i humbly request you to please give out more details on integrating coolProp with openfoam, i have found you in git hub and google groups, please consider my request

https://github.com/cbunge/coolPropTableGenerator


thank you

yours truly
chandrashekhar