It has been a long time since I announced the completion of my PhD and promised to resume development of Free CFD. The fact is, my PhD work dragged on with thesis revisions after the defense. At last, the whole thing is over. Now, all the time I can find out of my day job is dedicated to Free CFD.

Needless to say,  many new ideas, recommendations and plans have piled up in the mean time. But I am off to a start already. I am going through a painful process of  largely rewriting the code to allow for a level of flexibility that will yield itself to quick development of a whole set of new features.

As a glimpse of what is to come, imagine a solver where you can read multiple grids (not multiple-block grids) and specify exactly what equation set to solve on each and how do they interact all at run time. I am talking about overset, conjugate simulations, cartesian background grids…

The first step was to modularize the grid class and isolate it from flow variables. That is done. The current development version can now read in multiple grids, partition and distribute each. I am now building the current basic functionality over this framework.

grids {
grid_1 (file=sq_cavity.cgns; dimension=2;);
grid_2 (file=backstep.cgns; dimension=2;);
transform_1 (gridId=1; function=translate; begin=[0.,0.,0.]; end=[1.,0.,0.];);
transform_2 (gridId=1; function=scale; anchor=[-0.5,-0.5,-0.5]; factor=2.;);
transform_3 (gridId=2; function=stretch; anchor=[-0.5,-0.5,-0.5]; begin=[0.,-0.5,0.5]; end=[0.5,-0.5,0.5];);
transform_4 (gridId=2; function=rotate; anchor=[-0.5,-0.5,-0.5]; axis=[0,0,1]; angle=45;);
}

There are a number of things already developed but never released. These include dual time stepping, dynamic load balancing, new limiter and so on. I am keeping busy putting these all together toward a new major release.

There are many ways to support development.

• Spread the word. Link to Free CFD from your websites, mention it to your colleagues.
• Are you an expert in C++? You can help kosher up the code.
• Do you know the GNU make system? You can help setup a smooth installation process.
• Are you a CFD researcher? You can help test Free CFD, put in new models or simply provide your feedback.
• Don’t feel like participating in development but would like to see the project go on? You can definitely help by clicking on that orange donate button on the top right.