[jjhritz]

My boss wants to test some turbine designs using OpenFOAM to better refine them before fabricating prototypes. He wants me to do it, but I don't have any familiarity with CFD. My background is computer systems engineering and the closest I've ever been to CFD is University Physics 1 and Ordinary Differential Equations six years ago when I was working on my degree. It's not that I don't want to learn -- I find it rather fascinating and this is one of the few concrete skill-building opportunities this job has given me -- but I'm in way over my head here. I need guidance to get started.

Compounding this matter is the fact that my boss doesn't want to spend any money. He doesn't want to pay to get me a training course, he doesn't want to pay for CFD software, and he doesn't want to pay an outside consultant to do this for us. He also doesn't want me spending a month or more teaching myself with online tutorials, since he wants to start getting prototypes into field tests in the next couple weeks.

Is there some kind of crash-course out there that will teach me how to mesh an STL file, run it through an OpenFOAM simulation with a rotating/mixed frame of reference, then get useful information for calculating power output and efficiency in post-processing, all for the budget of zero dollars and in less than two weeks?