Extremely new to CFD (and OpenFOAM)-- Some broad questions
 

Hello,

I know almost nothing about CFD, but I think I have a problem that requires me to learn about it. I'm hoping that some people here can tell me if I'm headed in the right direction before I invest time into tackling the CFD/OpenFOAM learning curve.

I'm trying to learn about fish otoliths. These are little rigid pebbles that are part of a fish's ear, and they're used not only for sensing the presence of vibration, but also the direction of the vibration's origin. The otolith floats in a fluid-filled cavity whose inner surface is lined with sensory hairs. What I'd like to do is set up some simulations of a simple physical abstraction of that structure (e.g. define the cavity as a semi-rigid circle and the otolith itself as any non-circular shape, define the cavity as being filled with incompressible fluid, and also define the area outside the cavity as being occupied with fluid), perturb it with a vibration, and then capture the pressure along a surface defined as being some uniform distance away from the inner surface of the cavity. I drew a picture to help illustrate this.



Anyway, is this the sort of thing I can do in OpenFOAM? Would I have to learn twelve other software packages to set up a simulation like this? If possible, any hints on where I should get started would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Only the first answer... far from the final...
 

It would be advantageous if you could ignore the structural deformation in step one.