High Speed Flow Simulation Using OPENFOAM

Abstract

It is well known that openFoam has become a very popular tool for research work in different fields and particularly, in fluid dynamics. But, it is also known its lack of detailed documentation supporting solvers made using the set of libraries provided by openFoam. Therefore, it becomes necessary to establish appropriate verifications that can be useful to users going for instance, through the selection of equations discretization schemes from fvSchemes libraries and of solution solvers from fvSolutions libraries, to be later applied in the simulation of a given specific problem. With this purpose, executable
solvers available in openFoam 1.7 version to solve supersonic air flow problems are tested. Two different approaches have been taken in developing numerical methods to solve problems in transport phenomena at all Mach numbers and traditionally, they have been referred to as pressure-based and density-based methods. In this work, the advantages or disadvantages in applying any one of these methods, are addressed.
To accomplish the proposed tasks, 2D and axisymmetric numerical simulations of well posed problems that have either an analytical solution or available experimental data to compare with, are performed.