What is Computational Fluid Dynamics?

Computational Fluid Dynamics, also known as CFD, is the digital equivalent of a real world wind tunnel or flow bench. With CFD you can simulate the air flow around a racing car, the water flow through a heating system, and a whole host of other applications wherever a gas and/or liquid (including multiphase) flows. From your CFD simulation you can determine flow quantities, e.g., lift, drag, pressure loss, velocity profiles, and pressure distributions, to help guide your design.

CFD Simulation of an Unusual Drone Design

ofgpu v1.1 is the latest version of our free GPL library that provides GPU (sometimes referred to as GPGPU) linear solvers for OpenFOAM® v2.2.x. The library targets NVIDIA CUDA devices on Windows, Linux, and (untested) Mac OS X. GPU acceleration holds the promise of providing significant speed up at relatively low cost and with low power consumption compared to other alternatives. If you want to try our ofgpu library with OpenFOAM then we recommend that you use either a dedicated (i.e., not displaying graphics) high-performance NVIDIA graphics card or a Tesla card.

OpenFOAM on Windows using ofgpuHosted by Caedium Professional

Are you wondering how a polyhedral (dual) mesh compares to the equivalent tetrahedral and hexahedral meshes? Then you're in the right place. This study compares the volume element count, convergence, accuracy, and runtimes of the three different types of meshes for a simple duct.

Polygon Surface Mesh: Backward facing step in a duct

"How do I know in advance whether to perform a steady-state or an unsteady CFD simulation?" is a common question I get asked. The simple answer is, "you don't know", so I thought I would provide some help on when to use unsteady (also know as transient or time-dependent) simulations. I'll outline a process and tell-tale signs to help you make a guided decision.

Unsteady Vortex Shedding Caedium CFD SimulationVelocity contours (high definition video)