Comparison of a Commercial and an Open Source

CFD Software Package

Andras Horvath, Christian Jordan, Michael Harasek

Institute of Chemical Engineering

Getreidemarkt 9/166, 1060 Wien
Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Abstract In 2004 version 1.0 of the CFD package OpenFOAM was released under the GPL. The OpenFOAM (Open Field Operation and Manipulation) CFD Toolbox can simulate anything from complex fluid flows
involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to solid dynamics, electromagnetics and the pricing of financial options. OpenFOAM is
produced by OpenCFD Ltd, is freely available and open source. It has been
compiled successfully on many platforms. To validate the capabilities of
OpenFOAM simple test cases were set up and the results were compared
with the commercial CFD package Fluent and actual measurements. The
results obtained from OpenFOAM were very promising.

Introduction

Trustworthy results of CFD simulations are important in every-day engineering work where problems get too complex for simplified studies of particular phenomena of interest. Validation of specific features or models of
CFD codes can give valuable inputs for setting up models and boundary
conditions of new problems. Two flow problems of immediate applicability to every-day work of our work group were studied. The first one was
the boundary layer of a flat moving wall and the second one and incompressible, isothermal and turbulent free-jet in air, which was also supported
by measurements. All the simulations were performed using a steady state
solver.
Special care was taken to have the same premises for the boundary conditions and simulation models for both Fluent and OpenFOAM. This was
not easy at first because OpenFOAM offers a plethora of accessible settings
from in-depth solver-control to the highest combined boundary conditions
all controlled from configuration files using C++ like syntax.

Simulations

2.1

Moving Wall

The first test case was a simple 2D moving wall with pressure outlet1
conditions on three sides. The computational domain above the moving
wall consisted of 500 x 63 rectangular cells and had a geometric size of 5 x
0.5 m. The grading of the grid normal to the moving wall was defined by the
ratio of the wall-adjacent cell to the cell at the pressure outlet and was set to
10.48. The velocity of the moving wall was chosen to be 8.3 m/s. The grid
was the same for both Fluent and OpenFOAM. Results of the simulation
runs are shown in Fig. 1.
9

Fluent 6.2.18
OpenFOAM 1.2

Velocity magnitude [m/s]

8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
0

0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
Normal distance from moving wall [m]

0.5

Figure 1: Comparison of simulation results of OpenFOAM and Fluent. Position: 5 m along the moving wall. Turbulence Model: r-k-, non-equilibrium
wall-functions, 2nd order discretisation for all field variables.

2.2

Free-Jet

The second test case was a 3D turbulent isothermal free-jet of air, which
has been measured using LDA (Laser Doppler Anemometry) earlier [1]. An
overview of the simulated geometry is shown in Fig. 2. The mesh was originally constructed in Gambit and then successfully imported to OpenFOAM using the utility fluentMeshToFoam which is part of OpenFOAM.
One big drawback of OpenFOAM is that it does not come with an own
powerful meshing-tool. For this case the RNG-k- turbulence model was
used, again both in OpenFOAM and Fluent. The results of the simulations
compared to the measurements are shown in Fig. 3.
1

zero pressure gradient at boundary:

p
x

=0

Figure 2: Computational domain of the free-jet simulation. Size: 2 x 2 x

4 m. Boundary conditions: 5 pressure outlets and a wall at the XY-plane.
9

OpenFOAM 1.2
Fluent 6.2.18
Measurement

Velocity magnitude [m/s]

8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
0

0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
On-axis distance from duct-exit [m]

Figure 3: Comparison of simulation results and LDA-measurements for the

free-jet test case.

Interpretation and Outlook

OpenFOAM yields results very similar to those of Fluent (at least for the
considered test cases). Differences between turbulence models in Fluent
are much higher than the differences between Fluent and OpenFOAM (see
also [1]). Further studies will be conducted with special interest in transient (time dependent) flow simulations. Due to its object oriented, highly
extensible design some of the latest CFD models (v2f, VOF, etc.) are already implemented in OpenFOAM making it a candidate for fundamental
research.
Until now most of the Fluent/Gambit work was done on the AlphaCluster sc.zserv running Compaq-Tru64 . The OpenFOAM simulations
ran on workstations using Linux 2.6. Efforts are taken to port OpenFOAM1.3 to the new Power5-Cluster icp5.zserv running IBM-AIX . So far it
did not compile cleanly and only a small part of the tools/solvers are usable.

References
[1] Jordan C., Miltner M., Potetz A., Harasek M.: Modellierung turbulenter
Freistrahlen mit numerischer Str
omungssimulation (CFD); GVC/DECHEMAJahrestagungen 2005; CITEAH 77 (8), 949-1264 (2005), ISSN 0009-286 X;
Chemie Ingenieur Technik, 8/2005, P 5.14, 1061-1062
[2] OpenFOAM Programmers Guide
[3] OpenFOAM Users Guide
[4] Schlichting, H., Gersten, K.: Grenzschicht-Theorie, Springer-Verlag (1997)
[6] I.E. Idelchik: Handbook of Hydraulic Resistance, 3rd Edition, CRC Press,
(1994)