OpenFOAM

What do you like best?

It's free,opensource, with advanced settings

What do you dislike?

GUI is missing and it requires a skilled user

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Prepare "templates" for the simulation that you are going to run. This way, only the firts time it will take time to set a simulation.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I used openFOAM to solve external aerodynamics and multiphase flow. The main benefit is that the settings are advanced, so that you can have a deep control of the numerics. Moreover, you can integrate by coding several features, including on time visualization of residuals and parameters control.

When I used openFOAM for my master thesis project, I improved a lot my knowledge in the field of CFD. In general, commercial software are mostly used as black boxes. With openFOAM you have a higher degree of freedom that, on the other hand, requires a good knowledge of how a CFD code solves the Navier-Stokes equations.

OpenFOAM, compared to a commercial software, requires more human work-time. Therefore, when used in a company, a tradeoff between the cost of a specialized worked vs the cost of buying licenses must be considered.

If you are skilled in computer programming, you can integrate openFOAM with other tools to perform multi-physics simulation or to develop your improvemente to existing numerical models, as for example, turbulence models and more.

The drawback of OpenFOAM is the difficulty in using it. A user must be very skilled compared to when using a commercial software. The absence of the GUI needs you to setup everything by txt files, which might be initially hard, but, on the other hand, offers very good auotmation opportunities.

What I found really hard is to have a good opensource mesher.