OpenFOAM 2.3 release notes: 2.2 to 2.3 modifications ================================================ (Nabla Ltd. 30-07-04) VERSION CHANGES GCC 3.3.1 -> 3.4.1 JAVA 1.4.1 -> 1.4.2 openDX 4.1.3 -> 4.3.2 NEW SOLVERS INTERFACE CAPTURING MULTIPHASE FLOW: lesInterFoam and rasInterFoam solvers for interface capturing with LES and RAS turbulence modelling respectively. BUOYANCY DRIVEN FLOW: Efficient buoyantSimpleFoam solver for steady buoyant flow problems. SUPERSONIC FLOW: rhoSonicFoam and rhopSonicFoam developmental solvers introduced which use density-weighted variables to give better shock-capturing over the original sonicFoam solver. ENGINES: coldEngineFoam solver available for simple cold-flow engine runs. NUMERICS LARGE EDDY SIMULATION (LES): Improved discretisation for poor quality meshes and meshes including refinement patterns using a staggered grid formulation, Nabla phi differencing convection scheme and filter smoothing. SPRAY: New moving-mesh tracking algorithm which is more efficient and robust, with zero particle loss across parallel computational domains. INTERFACE CAPTURING MULTIPHASE FLOW: Improved discretisation for poor quality and/or refined meshes, featuring advanced interface management and a conditional differencing scheme that ensures robust solution behaviour under all conditions. MESH GENERATION blockMesh now includes: robust mesh `stitching' for non-matching block patches; optional block topology output (`-blockTopology') to enable visualisation of the blocks. MESH MANIPULATION cellSet/faceSet/pointSet are new tools for selecting regions of of cells/faces/points. refineMesh is a new mesh refinement tools used in conjunction with cellSet. subsetMesh creates a subset part of an initial mesh, in conjunction with cellSet, and automatically maps fields. Useful for selective pre- and post-processing. checkMesh performs additional checks for face concavity, patch topology and unmerged points. autoPatch automatically creates patch assignment based on feature angle. couplePatches reorders faces in pairs cyclic or processor patches to be in OpenFOAM format. createPatch creates patch out of faceSet. patchTool is a simple interactive patch creation tool. flattenMesh enforces exact flatness for 2D mesh. mergeMeshes combines 2 meshes but without connecting them. stitchMesh connects specified common patches in disconnected regions of a mesh so that, used in combination with mergeMeshes, we can connect 2 meshes. scalePoints performs non-uniform mesh scaling. splitMesh create topological split in mesh. splitMeshRegions split mesh with disconnected regions into constituent parts. MESH CONVERSION gmshToFoam converts a gmsh (www.geuz.org/gmsh) tetrahedral mesh converter o OpenFOAM format. mshToFoam converts a msh (from Adventure project) tetrahedral mesh to OpenFOAM format. tetgenToFoam converts a TetGen http://tetgen.berlios.de/) tetrahedral mesh to OpenFOAM format. writeMeshOBJ writes a mesh in Lightwave OBJ format. objToVTK converts a LightWave OBJ file to VTK format. SURFACE HANDLING All surface handling tools can read the following formats: AC3D; GTS; Lightwave OBJ; OFF; STL; STL-binary; TRI. surfaceAdd combines two surfaces (merges points). surfaceCheck performs various checks on surface. surfaceCoarsen performs simple surface coarsening. surfaceConvert converts one readable format to: AC3D; GTS; LightWave OBJ; OFF; SMESH; STL. surfaceFind finds the nearest triangle to points. surfaceMeshTriangulate converts the outside of a mesh to a surface file. surfacePointMerge collapses duplicate points. surfaceScale performs a non-uniform surface scaling. surfaceSetOutside sets consistent face normals on surface. surfaceSmooth performs simple smoothing of surface. surfaceSubset selects part of surface. surfaceToPatch apply regions of surface to patches of mesh. POSTPROCESSING foamToVTK utility generates standard VTK files for geometry and fields which may be read directly by VTK (Visualisation ToolKit) applications, including the powerful public-domain graphics packages ParaView and VisIt. Linux version is released with CVS repository version of ParaView with a beta release of a OpenFOAM format reader module. ParaView will supercede dxFoam/openDX as the supported post-processing facility shipped with OpenFOAM in version 2.4. Both the converter and reader handle mesh geometry/topology changes and polyhedral cell decomposition. For more information see: VTK: http://www.vtk.org ParaView: http://www.paraview.org VisIt: http://www.llnl.gov/visit dxFoam, the openDX reader, has incorporated some changes: uses software renderer and is set up for smaller monitors by default; displays selected time in graphics window; can display a cellSet. ensight76Foam, the Ensight7.6 reader, now has polyhedral cell support. Fieldview9Reader: the full Fieldview9 reader handles geometry/topology changes, polyhedral cells and can display cellSets. sampleSurface has added option for VTK output format. SYNTAX OF CASE FILES The fvSchemes file has more compact, consistent names for terms that are discretised. See the example cases for syntax updates. fvSolutions offers optional entries in PISO for staggered grid solvers. turbulenceProperties has a new naming convention for turbulence models and additional filter smoothing for LES deltas. transportProperties uses transportModel as main keyword (rather than incompressibleTransportModel, for example) controlDict has consistent names for automatically adjustable time step control entries: adjustTimeStep, maxCo, maxDeltaT. OTHER NEW FUNCTIONALITY All utilities now have solvers -time and -latestTime options to easily select time to operate on. Most handle geometry/topology changes. Better handling of user-defined boundary conditions for post-processing and simpler linkage or user libraries. New containers classes are: FixedList - a wrapper around fixed size array; PackedList - similar to a STL bit vector but with multiple bits per elements, for compact representation of small unsigned integers. Parallel running now has: zero contention communication schedule; linear/tree reduce operation for all containers; optional single precision exchange for bandwidth limited connections
