Coupling OpenFOAM to different solvers, physics, models, and dimensions using preCICE

OpenFOAM provides a rich arsenal of single-physics solvers, while other software projects also offer a wide range of solvers for structural dynamics or heat transfer. Moreover, packages for special applications, such as nuclear reactor safety, hemodynamics, or flood simulations need to integrate 3D flow phenomena into their workflow, which is often built around 1D or 2D models. The coupling library preCICE for partitioned multi-physics simulations can bring together different solvers, in a minimally invasive way. It allows them to communicate via MPI ports or TCP/IP sockets, it maps the boundary values using advanced methods such as RBF, and it couples them with Interface Quasi-Newton algorithms that accelerate the convergence. Its API is being used in a variety of well-known or in-house solvers, while official, user-ready adapters are provided for open-source packages such as OpenFOAM. The official OpenFOAM adapter supports conjugate heat transfer and fluid-structure interaction out-of-the-box, while it was recently extended to also support fluid-fluid coupling. In this paper, we do not focus on general aspects of preCICE or the OpenFOAM adapter, but we pick a certain aspect of fluid-fluid coupling, for which we discuss recent activities: coupling 3D OpenFOAM to any external 1D fluid solver. For general information on preCICE and the OpenFOAM adapter, we refer to [1] and [3, 4], respectively.      «

OpenFOAM provides a rich arsenal of single-physics solvers, while other software projects also offer a wide range of solvers for structural dynamics or heat transfer. Moreover, packages for special applications, such as nuclear reactor safety, hemodynamics, or flood simulations need to integrate 3D flow phenomena into their workflow, which is often built around 1D or 2D models. The coupling library preCICE for partitioned multi-physics simulations can bring together different solvers, in a mini...     »