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).

To install in the normal OpenFOAM directories (using wmake)

Simply use the supplied Allwmake script:

./Allwmake

This will install the library under $WM_PROJECT_DIR/platforms/$WM_OPTIONS/lib, which corresponds to the $FOAM_LIBBIN location.

To install in arbitrary locations (using cmake)

Without parameters, it installs to /usr/local as the default location. This can be changed as required with the cmake CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX parameter.

mkdir build; cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/install/path ../src/catalyst

The installation using the ./Allwmake script can be replicated with either of these commands:

mkdir build; cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$WM_PROJECT_DIR/platforms/$WM_OPTIONS ../src/catalyst
make install

or

mkdir build; cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${FOAM_LIBBIN%/*} ../src/catalyst
make install

Where to start

Look at the tutorials cases to get an idea of how different things might be done. Know what types of inputs your particular Catalyst function object is producing. The writeAll.py script included as part of the normal OpenFOAM distribution provides a good starting point for examing your output, but also for generating initial data sets for your pipelines. Use the script generation capabilities within ParaView to generate your pipelines. Save a backup of your pipelines as pvsm state files so that you can go back and tweak your pipelines without manually editing the python scripts and introducing possible errors.

Be aware that there may be some combinations of pipelines or annotations that misbehave. If you encounter such a problem, try backing out various pieces to isolate the cause. If it does appear to be a reproducible error, test it on a tutorial example too.

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.