advice

Hi,

I'm a new user of CAElinux. I don't know to use the great deal of program that are available with this OS. However, I'm exiting to learn it because I think that CAElinux could be a very important tool for my future.

I need an advice and ,in advance, I'm sorry to my scarce knowledge.

I'm an Italian PhD student, and for my research I need to develop and solve a model with 14 1-D mass balance equations. My lecturers have said me to use Comsol, but it is not free and I would like to learn an open source program that make the same thinks. Could you say me which is the best one from the program available on CAElinux, if it exist?

Thanks a lot for the time spent to read my message.

Best regard

Anacleto

I think COMSOL is related to Elmer which is included in CAELinux. However, I have never used it.

OpenFOAM is quite robust. I recall a paper looking at flow of oil through a filter where the filter was modeled by manually specifying PDEs using what looked to be a very simple language. I think OpenFOAM is more traditionally seen as a CFD solver but from wikipedia (I tried to go to the OpenCFD website but it was very slow):

"OpenFOAM (Open Field Operation and Manipulation) is primarily a C++ toolbox for the customisation and extension of numerical solvers for continuum mechanics problems, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD). It comes with a growing collection of pre-written solvers applicable to a wide range of problems."

Unfortunately, the GUI for OpenFOAM was dropped a few years back, I rather liked it (but I think of myself as part of generation GUI). As best I can remember there are different directories for different solvers. To use a solver a sub directory is created for the solver of interest (the exact location may be important) in which the input and output files for the specific problem are created. However, I suspect that I may have taken this (possibly unnecessary) approach due to lack of familiarity with linux.

Thanks for the answer!!

I'm starting to study the user guide of OpenFoam, and I've seen that it is very customizable.

However, I have some doubt. Indeed, from OpenFoam, but also for a lot of program implemented within CAElinux, they are thought for 2-D or 3-D simulations. In my case, instead, I have only one dimension in space plus the time. Moreover, I have these PDE equation are dependent with each others.
Hence, I dislike to start learning a program and then understand that this is not the one who I needed. Also because I have not a lot of time to do this. Finally, each advice fore me could be useful!!

Bye