README.md

About OpenFOAM

OpenFOAM is a free, open source CFD software released and developed by OpenCFD Ltd since 2004. It has a large user base across most areas of engineering and science, from both commercial and academic organisations. OpenFOAM has an extensive range of features to solve anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence and heat transfer, to acoustics, solid mechanics and electromagnetics. See documentation

OpenFOAM is professionally released every six months to include customer sponsored developments and contributions from the community - individual and group contributors, integrations (eg, from FOAM-extend and OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd) as well as governance guided activities.

License

OpenFOAM is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING in this directory or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/, for a description of the GNU General Public License terms under which you may redistribute files.

OpenFOAM Trademark

OpenCFD Ltd grants use of its OpenFOAM trademark by Third Parties on a licence basis. ESI Group and OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd are currently permitted to use the Name and agreed Domain Name. For information on trademark use, please refer to the trademark policy guidelines.

Please contact OpenCFD if you have any questions about the use of the OpenFOAM trademark.

Violations of the Trademark are monitored, and will be duly prosecuted.

Using OpenFOAM

If OpenFOAM has already been compiled on your system, simply source the appropriate etc/bashrc or etc/cshrc file and get started. For example, for the OpenFOAM-v2306 version:

source /installation/path/OpenFOAM-v2306/etc/bashrc

Compiling OpenFOAM

If you are compiling OpenFOAM from source, please see the relevant guides:

Location	Readme	Requirements	Build
OpenFOAM	readme	system requirements	build
ThirdParty	readme	system requirements	build

If you need to modify the versions or locations of ThirdParty software, please read how the OpenFOAM configuration is structured.

How do I know which version I am currently using?

The value of the $WM_PROJECT_DIR or even $WM_PROJECT_VERSION are not guaranteed to have any correspondence to the OpenFOAM release (API) value. If OpenFOAM has already been compiled, the build-time information is embedded into each application. For example, as displayed from blockMesh -help:

Using: OpenFOAM-com (2012) - visit www.openfoam.com
Build: b830beb5ea-20210429 (patch=210414)
Arch:  LSB;label=32;scalar=64

This output contains all of the more interesting information that we need: