Two Years After Being Launched: A Recap on the OpenFOAM Journal

OpenFOAM is a powerful open-source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, widely used in industry and academia. It provides a wide range of solvers and tools for simulating fluid flow, heat transfer, and other phenomena.

One of the main advantages of OpenFOAM is its flexibility. It can be used for numerous applications, including aerospace, automotive, biomedical, and chemical engineering. It also covers the three turbulence approaches: Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS), large eddy simulation (LES), and direct numerical simulation (DNS), which can be used to simulate different flow regimes.

Its open-source advantage allows users to access the source code, adapt it to their specific cases, and share their modifications with the community, which makes the software continuously being developed.

OpenFOAM’s community of users and developers is growing, which provides a wealth of resources and support, including tutorials, documentation, and forums. This makes it easy for new users to get started and for experienced users to find help and advice when needed.

There are several journals that publish research related to OpenFOAM and CFD. However, the OpenFOAM journal is the first to be specifically dedicated to works related to the OpenFOAM computational library, it is free to publish and open-access. The OpenFOAM Journal has now more than 6k followers on LinkedIn.

In the OpenFOAM Journal, the results are reproducible. Simple cases are directly attached to the manuscript as a zip file, while large cases are hosted in dataverse.

Another interesting concept about OpenFOAM Journal is that each publication has an associated discussion forum, to increase the interaction between the readers and the authors, and the overall impact of the contributions.

Until today, two volumes have been launched. The first volume was released in 2021 including three research papers covering Nasal Flows, Sequential Inverse Heat Conduction, and Francis Turbine Transients in OpenFOAM. The second volume appeared in 2022 with four different sections, including four full papers covering: A Head Loss Pressure Boundary Condition for Hydraulic Systems, Comparison of Overset Mesh with Morphing Mesh, and Implementation of a Modified Lid Driven Cavity. This volume includes an interesting review work entitled A Review on the Modelling of Wave-Structure Interactions Based on OpenFOAM. It also covers two technical notes about A Semi-Automatic Approach Based on the Method of Manufactured Solutions to Assess the Convergence Order in OpenFOAM and An open-source JavaScript framework for generating and visualizing parametric CFD results. Three contributions from the 16th OpenFOAM Workshop 2021 were published in the second volume: Artificial Compressibility with Riemann Solvers, A Coupled Actuator Line and Finite Element Analysis Tool, and Towards the Numerical Modelling of Residual Seabed Liquefaction Using OpenFOAM.