Free Online OpenFoam Seminar: Coupling OpenFOAM with external codes via preCICE

15.00

Welcome

15.35

Session on “Coupling OpenFOAM with external codes via preCICE” by Gerasimos Chourdakis, Research Associate at the University of Stuttgart, Institute for Parallel and Distributed Systems.

While OpenFOAM can simulate some multi-physics phenomena, such as conjugate heat transfer, or (with extensions) fluid-structure interaction, it can also be a powerful component in more complex coupled simulations, often involving specialized codes. Instead of creating a single code for a new application (an alternative approach with its own perks and challenges), the coupling library preCICE allows reusing existing codes (such as OpenFOAM, CalculiX, FEniCS, deal.II, SU2, or even your own in-house code) to solve coupled problems in a black-box, partitioned way. Each code writes and reads data on a specified boundary or overlapping domain region, while preCICE takes care of communication, space and time interpolation, and advancing the coupling in a numerically efficient way, reducing the number of external iterations over time. Developed by a team of researchers over more than ten years, preCICE is now a coupling ecosystem with an established community, manifested on the dedicated yearly workshops and its online forum, and is in the process of standardization of its community contributions. This seminar will introduce the main concepts of the preCICE library, providing starting points to use it in practice, and will focus on coupling OpenFOAM, demonstrating hands-on examples of coupled problems.

16.45

Conclusions