About FOAMY Lectures

Hello. This is Cüneyt Sert. I am a faculty member at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University (METU). I have been doing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) related research for more than 20 years. My current research interests include

• Adaptive hp finite element solution of flow problems.
• Microflows inside rough channels and pipes.
• Flow generated acoustics in stenosed blood vessels.
• Numerical modeling of ablation due to aerodynamic heating.
• Simulation of regenerative cooling in liquid rocket engines.

I’ve been a believer of free and open-source software (FOSS) for many years, especially in its use in academia. For the last 6 years or so, I’ve been trying to use OpenFOAM more and more in my research. I am trying to introduce it to my graduate students and encourage them to use it in their research. I started to prepare these lectures for my students and here I am sharing them with all of you hoping that they can be of use for a broader audience. I am not claiming to be an expert on OpenFOAM, and one of my motivations in preparing these lectures is to force myself to learn it better.

Actually the web is already full of teaching materials for OpenFOAM, mostly in the form of videos. Some of them are great, but they are a bit disorganized and can be hard to find. And some of them them are outdated. Like most CFD tutorials, including the official ones prepared for commercial CFD software by their own developers, the ones for OpenFOAM mainly focus on the “use of software”, not on the "correct solution of the problem". Their main concern is how to use a specific software to solve a specific problem. How to generate a mesh, how to solve the equations, how to post-process the results. But in all these steps you can use the tools in the right way or the wrong way. It is much easier to generate wrong results in CFD than the right ones, especially if you are inexperienced. It is not uncommon to see poor CFD practices in the video tutorials that you can find on the net.

In these lectures, we will be concerned by the following two points, the first one being more important than the second.

• How to do correct CFD?
• How to do it in OpenFOAM?

As written above, internet is full of CFD teaching materials. But everybody has his/her own style, and these are the ones in my style. In today's world of mobile internet circling around social media, CFD teaching materials are usually in the form of videos. But I like writing more than talking, and that’s why these lectures are in the form of (long) documents. Also I find editing videos to keep them up to date difficult, which is not that much of a concern for written stuff.

One of my plans is to make use of my own research and include that experience in these lectures as much as possible. In doing this I'll make use of our group's work in the field of vascular biomechanics, microchannel flows, vortex dominated aerodynamic flows, large eddy simulations, etc.

The very first lecture of these pages was created on 26 June 2019. New ones will be uploaded as they become ready, but unfortunately my progress is a bit slow. If you want to give any feedback or suggest corrections, please send an email to csert AT metu edu tr.