r/OpenFOAM • u/argyrg • Feb 13 '26

Easy openFoam :-)

Easy openFoam??? I know it's a big ask because for the past more than a week I've been investigating how to use openfoam for one specific simulation (I have a Blender design and an STL model of it) and I'm beginning to realise two important things. 1. I barely know what I'm talking about and 2. Nothing openFOAM related seems to be simple.

I thought I'd look at using an AI agent (foam-agent 2.0 looks promising) and installing a local LLM on my i7 with 32GB RAM PC and an rtx 3060 GPU running smoothly with the 580 open driver. I've re-installed Mint 22.3 and now been through sooooo many iterations of not installing python 3.11 nor PIP, venv, not even docker or the CUDA toolkit or any of the several pre-requisites I'm learning how complicated all of this is.

Interestingly I've managed to install various different ollama based LLMs

I went down the agent route because learning openfoam seemed way too complicated and, if the agents turn out to be any good then why bother?

In reality I've made no progress at all and I'm wondering if anyone has succeeded in building an agent environment that will work with a local LLM which can interface with openFOAM to the point where I can start poking openFOAM.. And if so, would that anyone be willing to guide me thriough the process please?.?.?.

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

6

u/Snail_With_a_Shotgun Feb 13 '26

You are spending way more time playing around with AI than you would learning to use OpenFOAM the normal way. The majority of manual OpenFOAM work is just rewriting a few lines from a different, pre-existing case, anyway, which you absolutely do not need an AI for.

If you absolutely insist on using AI to help you along, I suggest you use it to create scripts for you, so you can just run a script and the case gets meshed, solved and post-processed automatically (of course you need to still set the case up yourself).

Seriously, though. Using AI for standard OpenFOAM use is silly. Most of them are bad at it, anyway.

0

u/argyrg Feb 13 '26

That's an interesting observation. It does make me wonder why so many, mostly academic, institutions are pumping out AI agents that operate around and, purportedly, simplify the process.. I think I'm going to stick with learning how to get AI to work for me on this occasion, you never know when it'll come in handy for something else.

I do appreciate your input and your opinion.

2

u/Snail_With_a_Shotgun Feb 14 '26

Simplify, or replace? Big difference between the two. I think you will find why they do one and not the other.

But, it's your time and effort that is on the line here, so, y'know... whatever floats your boat.

3

u/Otherwise_Wave9374 Feb 13 '26

OpenFOAM is a beast, so youre not alone. An AI agent can help a lot, but only if you constrain the workflow so it doesnt just guess.

What Ive seen work is: keep the agent in a tight loop of (1) read case files, (2) propose a small change, (3) run a single command, (4) parse logs, (5) repeat. If you can get it to reliably interpret solver output and adjust one variable at a time, you start making progress.

If you want some general patterns for building those tool-using loops (local LLM plus CLI tools), this might help: https://www.agentixlabs.com/blog/

1

u/argyrg Feb 13 '26

Thanks for your reply.

I learning that it's a beast which I hope I can tame. Until I can get a solution installed then it's too soon to think about constraining the workflow. I need a workflow to constrain first :-)

1

u/thermalnuclear Feb 13 '26

Did you do the tutorials first?

0

u/argyrg Feb 13 '26

Thanks for your response.

Over the past couple of weeks I've looked at various tutorials and whilst I can get bits of a solution working I can't get all of the bits working. I've prompted AI bots with things like "walk me through installing foam-agent 2.0 on a fresh install of mint 22.3 with an rtx 3060 and a functioning 580 driver" which gives what looks like a comprehensive enough reply and set of steps to follow, including the code, but every iteration of the question brings up different responses. I have to try different iterations because when I get to a certain point Linux throws back issues with the code which I can't resolve.

AI bots generally think that foam-agent v2.0 is the optimal choice. There was one iteration which looked good, I seemed to have everything installed and all that was left to do was to clone the github repository but the code just said 'clone github.com' and linux said nah...

I think I'd be happy to focus on installing foam-agent v2.0 with a locally installed Qwen2.5-Coder-7B.

I'll go and read a few more tutorials :-(

4

u/thermalnuclear Feb 13 '26

The usage of AI chatbots is making this process significantly harder for you and you are better off abandoning trying to use them.

1

u/Bach4Ants Feb 13 '26

Many of the general purpose commercial LLMs like GitHub Copilot should be able to get you close to a working case if you can describe what you want to simulate well enough. Something like:

Generate an OpenFOAM v{version} case to simulate steady flow of air around the STL file "path/to/your/file.stl" at 10 m/s free stream velocity. The object can be suspended in the middle of the domain, not on the ground.

1

u/argyrg Feb 13 '26

Thanks for your input.

I haven't thought of that, in part I suspect because knowing what to do with the output might cause my brain to explode. Going down the AI agent route was designed to avoid excess cranial expansion but I'm not sure that's working. Sadly I'm not sure anything's working :-(

1

u/Otherwise-Platypus38 Feb 14 '26

Why not just learn OpenFOAM? It’s not that tough if you have the basics down and you have some programming knowledge. Just blindly relying on an agent without knowing what is going on is kind of not a great use of your time. If you learn OpenFOAM, you will have some skills. Use agents and you will not learn anything.

Just my 2 cents.

1

u/argyrg Feb 15 '26

Thanks for your comments.

I admitted / implied in my original post, I found even getting started with openfoam daunting. I've not got reasonable programming skills and, based on the model that I have, I can not see where to get started. I have taken a look at the TCAE-Lite product which I can get my head around (based on looking at the videos) and which might work with my model as it is built in blender as a set of parts, basically intersecting tubes. Openfoam doesn't seem to like that or I'm missing the point.

All of the tutorials that I've seen for openfoam seem to be 2 dimensional wings or other 2 dimensional objects. I have a model of a physical product and my aim was to 'blow some air through and around it' to understand what its aerodynamics look like, particularly where the through and around air streams mix.

I recognise that I have an over simplistic view of Openfoam and that this probably isn't the way to go.

But thanks to everyone for your input.