• When grid dimension was not specified in the input file, it didn’t fall back to its default value of 3, resulting in a smaller stencil (of node averaging) than normally would be used.
• Another bug fix affecting the accuracy of 3D node averaging.
• Entropy fix in Roe solver was not correct.

There are no changes to the input file interface. If you have run cases without specifying the dimension in the input file, you are likely to see noticable improvement with the new version.

This release contains a number of improvements contributing to the overall robustness of the Free CFD. We highly recommend you update your installation and as always, let us know if you have any feedback.

Click here to download and enjoy.

We have many plans for Free CFD that we are excited about. One of the central items almost any of those plans require is a sound turbulence model implementation. After trying many different approaches to 2 equation turbulence model implementations, we are releasing Free CFD 0.1.0. Since this goes a little beyond a bug fix and maintenance release cycle, we are treating this as a minor release. There will be no 0.0.2 version.

This version includes 3 choices for turbulence models:

• k-epsilon
• k-omega
• Menter’s BSL

We would like to emphasize though that these models are out for testing purposes. We are lacking some of the eventually needed features such as law-of-the-wall implementations. But we are proud anyway.

So, if you’d like to play around, please go to download section and please share your experience in our forum.

This release also includes several bug fixes related to parallel runs in some machines and for several other minor issues that we tend to forget.

CHANGE LOG - 0.0.1

- Temperature primite variable set is adopted

- Thermal diffusion is added to the energy equation

- Temperature boundary conditions are added

- Low-Mach preconditioner is added

- Added probe time history outputs

- Added integrated boundary fluxes time history outputs

- BUGFIX: petsc wasn’t recomputing the preconditioner at each time step

- BUGFIX: node averaging routine (affected only 2D uniform grids)

- Other minor improvements

We are happy to announce that Free-CFD 0.0 is released today, open source as promised. You can download the code anytime and the user’s manual should help you get started. The only requirement to download the code is to register to our forum. You only need a valid e-mail address which we promise not to litter. Registration is self-activated, you don’t need to wait for our confirmation. Your e-mail address will be kept confidential and will only be used for important anouncements regarding Free CFD such as new releases.

We hate mixing up good emotions with reservations here but we can’t pass without noting that this is an alpha release, meaning that there might be bugs here and there and that there is room for improvement. Download it, get familiar with it, ask about it to us or to the user base via our forum. Please don’t hesitate, we rely on your feedback for progress.

We are getting closer to a release version.

What is holding us? Most impotantly; the user’s manual. The code would be useless without good documentation so we are preparing instructions for compiling the code, setting up inputs, running the code and getting outputs.

Also, some of the features are being polished and debugged.

Now is a good time to become a member of our forum. Upon release, a notice will be sent to forum members and the code will be available to download from there. The forum will also serve as a platform for support by us or other users as well as for carrying any CFD related discussions.

• Written in C++
• Easy to use, easy to code
• Density based Navier-Stokes solver
• All speed ( We know that this is too general a statement but let’s say the code can handle a Mach number of 3 as well as 0.001)
• Parallel ( MPI )
• 3D Unstructured grids of mixed element types (Hexahedra, tetrahedra, prism, pyramid)
• Fully implicit time integration

The code is not released yet. But expect a release really soon.

The code is in early its early stages of development. It is in the process of being well validated and well documented. But the important thing is the idea: 

We want to extend the open-source ideology to CFD community with an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand and easy-to-develop code. We hope this project to be a sustained effort,  very dynamic in its development, driven by your feedback, friendly and responsive to you. 

By the way, we are both PhD students at the University of Michigan, Aerospace Engineering Department. 

You can submit to our feed for the first release announcement.