CFD Software Tools
ANSYS Fluent
ANSYS Fluent software contains the broad physical modeling capabilities needed to model flow, turbulence, heat transfer, and reactions for industrial applications ranging from air flow over an aircraft wing to combustion in a furnace, from bubble columns to oil platforms, from blood flow to semiconductor manufacturing, and from clean room design to wastewater treatment plants. Special models that give the software the ability to model in-cylinder combustion, aeroacoustics, turbomachinery, and multiphase systems have served to broaden its reach.
ANSYS Fluent software is today used as an integral part of the design and optimization phases of their product development. Advanced solver technology provides fast, accurate CFD results, flexible moving and deforming meshes, and superior parallel scalability. User-defined functions allow the implementation of new user models and the extensive customization of existing ones. The interactive solver setup, solution and post-processing capabilities of ANSYS Fluent make it easy to pause a calculation, examine results with integrated post-processing, change any setting, and then continue the calculation within a single application. Case and data files can be read into ANSYS CFD-Post for further analysis with advanced post-processing tools and side-by-side comparison of different cases.
The extensive range of physical modeling capabilities and the fast, accurate CFD results that ANSYS Fluent software has to offer results in one of the most comprehensive software packages for CFD modeling available in the world today. A native two-way connection to ANSYS structural mechanics products allows capture of even the most complex fluid–structure interaction (FSI) problems in the same easy-to-use environment.
Available Version and Platform at CERN: Version 13.0.0, released on 11th Oct 2010, on Linux
OpenFOAM
The OpenFOAMŪ (Open Field Operation and Manipulation) CFD Toolbox is a free, open source CFD software package produced by OpenCFD Ltd. OpenFOAM has an extensive range of features to solve anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics and electromagnetics. It includes tools for meshing, notably snappyHexMesh, a parallelized mesher for complex CAD geometries, and for pre- and post-processing. Almost everything (including meshing, and pre- and post-processing) runs in parallel as standard, enabling users to take full advantage of computer hardware at their disposal.
By being open, OpenFOAM offers users complete freedom to customise and extend its existing functionality, either by themselves or through support from OpenCFD. It follows a highly modular code design in which collections of functionality (e.g. numerical methods, meshing, physical models, …) are each compiled into their own shared library. Executable applications are then created that are simply linked to the library functionality. OpenFOAM includes over 80 solver applications that simulate specific problems in engineering mechanics and over 170 utility applications that perform pre- and post-processing tasks, e.g. meshing, data visualisation, etc.
Available Version and Platform at CERN: Version 2.1.0 released on 19th Dec 2011, on Linux
