Any potential for CFD using openfoam etc. ?

SCaruso

Any potential for Mecway CFD using openfoam etc.?
FreeCad now has a CFD workbench (have not personally tried)
But I believe Mecway would be a much better front end (and result display) for a solver such as Openfoam.
Any plans on the horizon?

Sergio

There are some hacks to use Mecway as preprocessor for OpenFoam, but the postprocessing must be done in Paraview. Check out this Youtube channel with several tutorials and material.

https://www.youtube.com/@simcommons8090/videos

I also will find usefull having at least the CCX CFD cards in Mecway at least. Or well, another different program for CFD just as easy to use as Mecway, maybe a Mecway CFD

kennethfugate

I rewrote the Mecway to STL program that SimCommoms uses in their examples a few months ago. The SimCommons program was a fortran program that needed linux tp pipe the liml file into it. They sent me a copy of the fortran source code and I rewrote it in python (as a standalone program, not a Mecway python script). It takes the filename and an optional scale factor on the command line and creates separate stl files as shown in the Simcommons video https://youtube.com/watch?v=osidBnMUfLU. I've attached the python file.

Ken

Sergio

That's great, I have to make time to test it.

JohnM

Open Foam comes down to surface preparation and selecting the right template. The SimCommons approach uses Mecway to identify different patch surfaces of an STL surface, then uses Linux scripts to pull the right template and combine with the geometry. The Open Foam "flavor" used is the blueCape installation of Open Foam V8 (the . org version) and works seamlessly in a Windows environment.

We have been using this method for over 5 years; it has been very effective. The geometries can be quite complex and there is a large selection of physics that you can employ. What I like is that the engineers who are already comfortable with Mecway can easily use it to prep their fluid models.

For post processing, Paraview works great, there's really no need to reinvent this part.

Here is another example

mmartin

Good morning

Last week I installed Baram CFD(https://nextfoam.github.io/baram-pages/), which is an opensource gui openfoam front-end. Right now I am doing some testing which means I am still messing with meshers. My intentions are to do simple wind simulations to compare CFD pressure coefficient with EC1(European wind load regulation).

I did some initial mesh imports using MW as preprocessor .
I will watch SimCommons OF videos this weekend. The truth is that we are very confortable on MW, and this is a great starting point to carry on CFD simulations.

Manuel

SCaruso

Thanks for the replies!! I somehow had "forgotten" about the SimCommons as I had seen it when I was investigating this a year or so ago. So I will look back at that. I personally need something with the "feel" of MecW. I will look again at SCommons anew. Your replies are very much appreciated!