Fluids module
What it actually does.
A native Windows desktop workbench. Twenty-six analysis types, each deriving its own solver, field set, dictionaries and boundary conditions. It runs on a bundled OpenFOAM® v2606 solver core, so there is nothing else to install and nothing to configure.
Analysis types
Every one verified by generating a case and putting it through the bundled solver, rather than by inspecting the dictionaries it wrote.
Flow
- Incompressible (steady and transient)
- Compressible
- Supersonic, density-based
- Rotating frame (MRF)
- Passive scalar transport
- Potential free surface
- Shallow water
Heat
- Solid conduction
- Convective heat transfer
- Conjugate heat transfer
- Buoyancy-driven convection
Multiphase
- Volume of Fluid (VoF)
- Compressible VoF
- Cavitation
- Miscible mixing
- Sediment and drift flux
- Euler–Euler
- Marine and waves
Particles and reactions
- Lagrangian particle tracking
- Spray
- Reacting combustion
- Premixed combustion
Beyond fluids
- Solid stress
- Electrostatics
- Magnetostatics
- MHD
- Atmospheric boundary layer
In depth, by analysis type
What the physics is, which solver runs it, and what the application configures for you.
Meshing
| snappyHexMesh | Castellation, snapping and layer addition, driven from panels rather than a dictionary. |
|---|---|
| Refinement regions | Boxes, spheres and surface-based refinement with per-level control. |
| Boundary layers | Target y+, layer count and expansion ratio, with the first-layer thickness derived and coverage reported. |
| Quality controls | Non-orthogonality, skewness and aspect-ratio limits, checked before the run starts. |
| Geometry import | Every polygon format, plus STEP, IGES and BREP through OCCT. |
| Cell zones | MRF, AMI, overset, porous media and sources, created by topoSet rather than described in prose. |
Physics setup
- Sixteen turbulence models — RANS and LES families, each with the wall treatment it needs.
- Five viscosity models — Newtonian plus four non-Newtonian.
- Material library for fluids and solids, so a property is chosen rather than typed.
- Per-patch boundary conditions that know which fields they require — the missing-field discovery happens before the run, not forty minutes into it.
Running
- Local or over SSH.
- Log streamed back live.
- Residuals, monitors and problems in a dock while it solves.
- Batch flags drive the same path from a script —
--mesh,--run,--report,--dump-caseand others.
Post-processing
Internal. No ParaView round trip.
- Surfaces, slices and contours
- Streamlines and vector glyphs
- Thresholds
- Surface (oil-flow) lines
- Probes and plot-over-line
- Colour maps
- Animation export
Reporting
An A4 PDF a colleague can read.
- Cover sheet, running header, contents.
- Key results in engineering units.
- A verification checklist that states the threshold behind each verdict, rather than a green tick.
- The split of drag into pressure and friction.
- Run cost.
- Figures captured from the real viewport.
- A case-level comparison report across every simulation in the case — which is what a mesh study was run to produce.
A case holds several simulations
The geometry belongs to the case. The mesh, the physics, the conditions and the results belong to each simulation of it.
So a mesh-independence check, a turbulence-model comparison or a second elevon angle is another simulation, not another case — and the comparison between them has somewhere to live.
Open a worked example and you get three simulations of the same geometry: a baseline, the same setup on a mesh twice as fine, and the same mesh with k-epsilon instead of k-omega SST. Mesh and run the three, and the comparison report answers both of the questions a single run cannot — whether the answer has converged on the mesh, and whether it depends on the turbulence model.
Platform
Windows today; Linux and macOS builds are coming. The solver stack already runs on all three — what remains is packaging, code signing and a release channel per platform, which is work rather than a question.
No date, for the same reason nothing else here has one. If the platform you use is the thing standing between you and buying, say so — that is what decides which one lands first.