Suitability of OpenFOAM Courses

The following information is provided as a guide to help people assess the suitability of OpenFOAM courses for their personal needs. It contains general advice that we endeavour to be as useful as possible, but it is provided only under the terms of our disclaimer.

Foundation and Advanced Courses

The Foundation and Advanced courses contains a combination of information about OpenFOAM, CFD, programming, etc and exercises that the student undertakes.

The Foundation Course is designed to impart important background knowledge to be able to use and program in OpenFOAM effectively. People generally underestimate the amount and range of information covered on the Foundation Course, particularly on the programming side. For example, programming of applications and the required background in numerics is covered on the Foundation course rather than the Advanced course, as it is the first programming task people tend to want to do in OpenFOAM.

The Advanced Course is designed more towards using OpenFOAM for real engineering problems, e.g. with complex geometries. Those people who wish to use OpenFOAM immediately on such problems should attend this course. Users with reasonable experience of OpenFOAM find the Advanced Course introduces them to features of OpenFOAM they never knew existed and shows further programming to give them greater confidence in customising OpenFOAM for their personal needs.

We try to keep any overlap between courses to a minimum. All exercises are stand alone; there are no exercises that run across the two courses. With the exception of boundary conditions, all topics are stand alone, so do not run across both courses. It is only through the accumulation of background knowledge that the courses are linked. Quite often, people who attend only the Advanced Course find there are gaps in their knowledge that would have been filled by attending the Foundation Course.