Turbulence Inflow Tool

Jiawei Wan 1, Peter Mackenzie-Helnwein 2

The Turbulence Inflow Tool (TInF) is designed to collect all required properties and parameters needed for various turbulence inflow models in OpenFOAM, and to augment an existing wind-around-a-building model by adding the necessary sections to respective parameter definition files.

The generic workflow involved is as follows.

  1. Build your OpenFOAM model as you would without using a turbulence inflow model. Use a generic patch with a suitable name for you will need to identify that patch by its name inside TInF.

2. Run TInF following, identify your model folder, adjust the parameters as desired, and export to your model definition. Consult Chapter User Manual for details on those steps.

  1. Run OpenFOAM using the updated model definition.

This document covers the features and capabilities of Version ‘1.0.2’ of the tool. Users are encouraged to comment on what additional features and capabilities they would like to see in future versions of the application through the Message Board.

Note

The first open source release of OpenFOAM was in 2004. It was based on the FOAM code, which was originally developed by Henry Weller in 1989. As sometimes happens with open source software when commercial interests get involved, the code forked over time and a number of open source distributions from different entities are available. The two main distributions of the code come from the OpenFOAM Foundation and from ESI OpenFOAM. Currently Turbulence Inflow Tool compiles and runs with versions 6 and 7 of the code released by the OpenFOAM Foundation.

Contact

Frank McKenna, NHERI SimCenter, UC Berkeley, fmckenna AT berkeley.edu

1

University of Notre Dame

2

University of Washington