OpenFOAM, released by OpenCFD Ltd. (with the name trademarked since 2007[9]) first released as open-source in 2004. (Note: since 2012, OpenCFD Ltd is wholly-owned subsidiary of ESI Group)
FOAM-Extend, released by Wikki Ltd. (since 2009)
OpenFOAM, released by OpenFOAM Foundation. (since 2011)
History
Flow simulation using OpenFOAM and ParaView for visualization
The name FOAM has been claimed to appear for the first time as a post-processing tool written by Charlie Hill, in the early 90s in Prof. David Gosman's group in Imperial College London.[citation needed] As a counter argument [verification needed], it has been claimed that Henry Weller created the FOAM library for field operation and manipulation which interfaced to the GUISE (Graphical User Interface Software Environment) which was created by Charlie Hill for interfacing to AVS.
As a continuum mechanics / computational fluid dynamics tool, the first development of FOAM (which became OpenFOAM later on) was virtually always presumed to be initiated by Henry Weller at the same institute by using the C++ programming language rather than the de facto standard programming language FORTRAN of the time to develop a powerful and flexible general simulation platform. From this initiation to the founding of a company called Nabla Ltd, (predominantly) Henry Weller and Hrvoje Jasak carried out the basic development of the software for almost a decade.[10] For a few years, FOAM was sold as a commercial code by Nabla Ltd.,[11] on 10 December 2004, it was released under GPL and renamed to OpenFOAM.[5]
In 2004, Nabla Ltd was folded. Immediately afterwards, Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields and Mattijs Janssens founded OpenCFD Ltd to develop and release OpenFOAM.[12] At the same time, Hrvoje Jasak founded the consulting company Wikki Ltd[13] and maintained a fork of OpenFOAM called openfoam-extend, later renamed to foam-extend.
In April 2008, the OpenFOAM development moved to using git for its source code repository.[14]
On 5 August 2011, OpenCFD transferred the OpenFOAM software (source code) and documentation from OpenCFD to the newly incorporated OpenFOAM Foundation, registered in Delaware State, USA.[15]
On 25 April 2014, The OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd was incorporated in England, as a company limited by guarantee with all assets transferred to the UK and the US entity dissolved, together with changes to the governance of the Foundation. Weller and Greenshields left OpenCFD and formed CFD Direct Ltd in March 2015.[18]
On 3 September 2024, Cristel de Rouvray, CEO of ESI Group officially resigned as Founder Member and director of The OpenFOAM Foundation Limited.
The OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd directors are Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields, and Brendan Bouffler.
The following are the three main variants of OpenFOAM:
OpenFOAM, Foundation, developed and maintained primarily by CFD Direct Ltd with a sequence based identifier (e.g. 6.0) (from 2011).[19]
OpenFOAM, OpenCFD, developed and maintained mainly by OpenCFD Ltd, (ESI Group company since 2012) with a date-of-release identifier (e.g. v1606) (from 2016).[20]
The FOAM-Extend Project, mainly maintained by Wikki Ltd. (from 2009).
OpenFOAM Governance
aeronautics
In 2018, OpenCFD Ltd. and some of its industrial, academic, and community partners established an administrative body, i.e. OpenFOAM Governance, to allow the OpenFOAM's user community to decide/contribute the future development and direction of their variant of the software.[21]
The structure of OpenFOAM Governance consisted of a Steering Committee and various Technical Committees. The Steering Committee comprised representatives from the main sponsors of OpenFOAM in industry, academia, release authorities and consultant organisations. The organisation composition of the initial committee involved members from OpenCFD Ltd., ESI Group, Volkswagen, General Motors, FM Global, TotalSim Ltd., TU Darmstadt, and Wikki Ltd.[22]
Tecplot is the name of a family of visualization & analysis software tools developed by American company Tecplot, Inc., which is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. The firm was formerly operated as Amtec Engineering. In 2016, the firm was acquired by Vela Software, an operating group of Constellation Software, Inc. (TSX:CSU).
ParaView is an open-source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client–server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain interactive frame rates for large datasets. It is an application built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) libraries. ParaView is an application designed for data parallelism on shared-memory or distributed-memory multicomputers and clusters. It can also be run as a single-computer application.
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Silicon Graphics International Corp. was an American manufacturer of computer hardware and software, including high-performance computing systems, x86-based servers for datacenter deployment, and visualization products. The company was founded as Rackable Systems in 1999, but adopted the "SGI" name in 2009 after acquiring Silicon Graphics Inc. out of bankruptcy.
CD-adapco was a multinational computer software company that authored and distributed applications used for computer-aided engineering, best known for its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) products. In 2016 the company was acquired by Siemens Digital Industries Software.
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References
↑ Chen, Goong; Xiong, Qingang; Morris, Philip J.; Paterson, Eric G.; Sergeev, Alexey; Wang, Yi-Ching. "OpenFOAM for Computational Fluid Dynamics". Notices of the AMS. 61 (4).
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