General Description

Library for OpenFOAM that provides a runtime-selectable function object for embedding ParaView Catalyst in-situ visualization into arbitrary OpenFOAM simulations.

Supports in-situ conversion of the following types:

• finite volume meshes and fields. Single or multi-region.
• finite area meshes and fields. Single region.
• lagrangian (clouds). Single or multiple clouds.

Overset

For simulations with overset meshes, internal blanking is used to hide the holes so that user visualization pipelines do not require any thresholding workarounds. Note, however, that visualization artifices may be present in multi-overlapping regions.

Requirements

1. OpenFOAM-v1806 or a recent development version from OpenFOAM.com.
2. ParaView or ParaView Catalyst 5.5 or newer, compiled with python support (optionally with MPI support).

Patching

It is highly recommended to patch the ParaView 5.5 sources to include changes (MR2433, MR2436) that will be part of the ParaView 5.6 release.

These patches are necessary to ensure that the in-situ results are placed in the correct output directory. Without these patches, the results will always land in the current working directory: not in the case-local insitu subdirectory and ignoring the OpenFOAM -case parameter.

These patches will be automatically applied when the makeParaView script from OpenFOAM ThirdParty is used.

Building

Ensure that the OpenFOAM environment is active and that ParaView or Catalyst can be found (Eg, the ParaView_DIR environment is properly set).

With the OpenFOAM wmake

Simply use the supplied Allwmake script:

./Allwmake

This will install into $FOAM_LIBBIN

With cmake directly

Without parameters, it installs to $FOAM_LIBBIN as the default output location for the library.

mkdir build; cd build
cmake ../src/catalyst

which is identical to

mkdir build; cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY=default ../src/catalyst

To specifying an alternative library location, change the cmake parameter:

mkdir build; cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY=/output/path/lib ../src/catalyst

The cmake configuration possibilities are functional, but still very rudimentary at the moment.

Authors

• Mark Olesen | mark.olesen@esi-group.com | (ESI-OpenCFD)
• Simone Bna | simone.bna@cineca.it | (CINECA)

License

Licensed under GNU General Public License http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ with the same terms as OpenFOAM itself.