In the last school year, I worked on a research project in the Catalytic Process Engineering lab (Dept. of Chemical Engineering) at McGill University. My project is to investigate the effects of different mesh generations on the computation of heat flow dynamics within a closed system. I am currently learning how to use OpenFOAM to develop the computational fluid dynamics simulations.
I started by learning how to build geometries (and their respective boundaries) in Salome. Next, the geometry needed to be discretized into a mesh, and loaded into OpenFOAM.
I then chose an appropriate solver (chtMultiRegionFoam) and specified the initial and boundary conditions for the system. The final simulation could resolve the hydrodynamics and temperature distribution of the reacting system.
The primary outcome of this goal was in discovering, from building the geometry to postprocessing, the workflow of building a simulation. Complex, multi-region geometries and meshes were built in Salome, and properly imported into OpenFOAM. ChtMultiRegionSimpleFoam was used to simulate both momentum and mass transfer within OpenFOAM. The momentum was balanced within 1% error, and shown to match theoretical results very well. The simulation could also properly couple heat transfer between solid/fluid regions. Lastly, energy was balanced within 10%.