Chapter 1 Introduction

This guide details the process of setup, simulation and post-processing for some OpenFOAM test cases, with the principal aim of introducing a user to the basic procedures of running OpenFOAM. The $FOAM_TUTORIALS directory contains many more cases that demonstrate the use of all the solvers and many utilities supplied with OpenFOAM. Before attempting to run the tutorials, the user must first make sure that they have installed OpenFOAM correctly.

The tutorial cases describe the use of the blockMesh pre-processing tool, case setup and running OpenFOAM solvers and post-processing using paraFoam. Those users with access to third-party post-processing tools supported in OpenFOAM have an option: either they can follow the tutorials using paraFoam; or refer to the User Guide for details on post-processing with external applications.

Copies of all tutorials are available from the tutorials directory of the OpenFOAM installation. The tutorials are organised into a set of directories according to the type of flow and then subdirectories according to solver. For example, all the icoFoam cases are stored within a subdirectory incompressible/icoFoam, where incompressible indicates the type of flow. If the user wishes to run a range of example cases, it is recommended that the user copy the tutorials directory into their local run directory. They can be easily copied by typing:


    mkdir -p $FOAM_RUN
    cp -r $FOAM_TUTORIALS $FOAM_RUN