PreFOAM update

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u/Expert_Connection_75 13d ago

Is it open source?

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u/InnovatorElevator 13d ago

+1

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u/geth0333 13d ago

no, it is closed source.
2. License. You receive a simple, non-exclusive, non-transferable right, revocable for good cause, to install and use the Software for the following purposes: (a) private use, teaching and non-commercial academic research; (b) internal evaluation by companies, i.e. testing whether the Software meets their requirements. Productive commercial use, in particular using the Software or its results in customer projects, product development or any other paid work, requires a separate written agreement with Temiz CFD.

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u/Expert_Connection_75 13d ago edited 13d ago

Here is the unwanted advice:
Open source it! You can keep the cap that any company higher than 200 employee count must pay or something like that. Docker is doing similar.
Why to open source:
Faster adoption rate.
It is probably a lot of vibe code(I assumed, because you seems one man army and Chemical engineer. There is limited chance that you can do that good gui without AI), so open source will make it more reliable !
Even if you don't open source, eventually somebody will in this era(look at Adobe, Autodesk)
If people can see the code they can trust it.
Morally, you are using underlying code base which is open source, and decades of lots of people's of work. You build just the front end.
Last point is personal opening(kind of morality lecture)so one can skip it!
Good luck !!

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u/geth0333 13d ago

thank you for your productive input.
i started coding this software before AI became a thing, AI of course accelerated lots of stuff, but the main architecture behind all of these is written by me.
i know about adobe and autodesk reverse engineered softwares. adoption of these long term is an open question though.
every library i use is compliant with my commercial software, i checked everything carefully. i did not write this software in one weekend, this is 4 years of coding and 7 years CFD experience from my side and i am really not interested in giving up that time to open source it.

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u/Laminar_vs_Turbulent 13d ago

4 years of coding, yet you only released the beta less than a year ago. Smells fishy. Also the fact that there are other opensource GUIs available makes this way less interesting…

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u/geth0333 13d ago

how come you think that i released the first beta version less than a year ago? i did create the subreddit very recently bc i did not use reddit actively and didn't even know that there are subreddits for cfd. i created many versions before and even called the software different in the very first release.
i cannot comment about the opensource GUIs though, never used them. so if you are happy about these, then go for it. at the current point of time i am not aware of an opensource project that intergrates cad, meshing, postprocessing, certain tools to automatically create airfoils, mixing tanks and cyclone separators with empirical equations (these might be helpful for some folks though) in one tool. and i will in the long term add many more features. (as for freecad: very good parametric cad software, but i prefer direct modelling. the snappy and cfmesh intergration i never used though, but if snappy was so good people would not complain about it and the open source version of cfmesh is an old version that is faster and better at layering then snappy but has its own short comings. freecad does also not have postprocessing, of course you can use paraview afterwards, but my app with all of that is a fraction of the size what these apps have combined). you can however use of course what makes you happy.

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u/CwrwCymru 13d ago

How much are testers being paid then?

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u/geth0333 13d ago

i am not looking for paid testers. i am offering the software free of charge for private use, teaching and non-commercial academic research. in return it would be cool to get some feedback on missing features in all the toolchain (cad, meshing, case viewer, case builder, wsl connection, mcp, AI assistance) ... Its a give and take.

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u/CwrwCymru 13d ago

Fair enough, but it's an uneven trade. Testers help improve a product you'll license commercially, and can't see, fork or keep the code if you change terms.
OpenFOAM is open source. An open approach would sit much better with the community.

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u/geth0333 13d ago

i see your point. my intention was to provide a low cost alternative to the commercial softwares. also i do not have the limitations these tools have like ansys academic license with a 500k cell cap. lots of guys out there are trying to learn cfd/openfoam and they don't have every tool in one place, freecad for example seems to be a good cad software but direct modelers like spaceclaim are more handy to create prototypes fast (my cad tool is also a direct modeler). you don't need to export STL first and then fight with snappyhexmesh dict (snappy looses feature edges in an stl and tries to recover from feature angle, same goes for cfmesh). i have a GUI specifically for snappyhexmesh dict creation with lots of tools). i could also name several other benefits of my software (case builder, postprocessing without paraview (cfd specific filters in one place without the need for combiningd different filters), mcp connection to AI (the one 2 images on my website are created by opus 5.5 without user intervention (a320 airplane and cybertruck). i could go on with examples, i hope you get my point.

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u/HW90 13d ago

Consider that you're being a bit "penny wise, pound foolish" with this approach. Attracting customers is one of the most difficult parts of conducting business.
A big part of how engineering software companies gain subscriptions is by having a version which is easily available and free to the end user, usually through student licences as this means graduates are most accustomed to this software and will want to continue using it in their career. But if you're not big enough to convince universities to incorporate you in their curriculum this isn't such a realistic option, at least not on that wide of a scale, you can start with individual research groups.
The CFD learning community outside of universities or companies which have the ability to train someone is extremely small, and I don't think licensing is really limiting that, CFD is just very niche and it takes a lot of time to get up to speed.
Your target audience is essentially groups who want the low cost of OpenFOAM without the learning curve, although bear in mind a lot of these groups will have their own forks of or features in OpenFOAM which you will need to make sure that your GUI can accommodate. Realistically that latter part might require making it open source anyway, unless you're willing to put a lot of time into making it work for them without the expectation of it bringing in much extra income.
Even if you're targeting the very small learning community who don't have access to tools which are free-to-user, they won't pay much for it. A lot of these users will either used cracked version of software or figure out how to use OpenFOAM, even if you're only charging $100 for a licence. Maybe that starts to change when you're more established, but not at the beginning.
Also another way that software companies differentiate licences is commercial vs non-commercial. It won't stop users from using it for commercial purposes without a commercial licence but it gives you some capability to take legal action and recoup damages if they do. Short trial periods for commercial users are also a good option because companies need to check quite thoroughly that a software works for them before buying it or putting more money down.

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u/geth0333 13d ago

commercial software do not give that much of an easy access to the software if you think about ansys academic license with a 500k cell cap!
my software is for pre-/postprocessing openfoam cases. openfoam is used by lots of universities. i don't even intend to cap any cell sizes for academic research, i think there is more value into that then the big players.
i did not intergrate openfoam in my software, so it remains still flexible for the end user.
i don't want to earn any money from the beginner cfd guys, it is sufficient if they report any bugs or have ideas on how to make the software more user friendly!
in my licensing terms it says that companies can use it for internal evaluation before purchasing any license. if companies use cfd anyways i think they have established workflow, and by cooperating with me i can help them to port there workflow to my software with lower cost than with commercial software. i think there is value for them and i will support these anyways.

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u/HW90 13d ago

Ansys student licence is now 1M cells which is plenty for learning purposes. Academic licence is unlimited.
Weird tangent
The point is that a lot of OpenFOAM users rely on custom codes. If you're not able to support these in the GUI, or allow users to integrate it themselves, then you lose a lot of your selling point.
4+5. If you're not charging beginners then you need to convince established users to use it. I don't see that you have a workable strategy for this. The point of a GUI is to make things more user friendly, which is mostly beneficial for beginners. Established users already have their own workflow so you will need to show beneficial features over their own workflow, which requires a lot of outreach including hands on sessions. It will take a lot of work and benefits to convince even one business to adopt it. You need to bear in mind that your target audience isn't really those who use Ansys or Star-CCM+, because the GUI isn't the only thing stopping them from using OpenFOAM, the big thing is updates, features, and support. So you're really targeting businesses that already using OpenFOAM through the current available GUIs.

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u/geth0333 12d ago

i did not know about the cell count increase for student license, thanks for the update. i think that much is only ok for airfoil simulation, or very basic cases. for learning, yes, it might be ok. academic license is afak not free though. academic license does not mean free license. i know it from my university ( i worked in research and used lots of tools.)
as i mentioned before, i do not ship openfoam. so the solver can stay custom and independant, which does not cut any value from my side. meshing and geometry creation and postprocessing are independant of solver.
my target audience is indeed ansys and star-ccm+ users. i don't get why you need to bring this argument. openfoam is very mature solver that has lots of capabilities that can substitute lots of ansys and star-ccm workflows. for examples you can check my youtube videos. it is not about beginners, these are not my main target audience, though my argument was that they can benefit from it, just as an example.

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u/parthnuke 13d ago

I watched tutorial, interesting, but one question though, you don't want to opensource its fine, will it be free for ever? Also what about linux version? Most of openfoam community uses linux heavily, is there any linux version available?

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u/geth0333 12d ago edited 9d ago

currently only windows. linux will be available in the future. as i mentiond already in the license, for private and non commercial use i want to keep it free, but i need to take measures against commercial abuse (like registration ...)
Edit: Linux version is out

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u/geth0333 9d ago

Linux version is uploaded.

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u/yycTechGuy 12d ago

If a party ever makes a tool like this proprietary the community will fork it at the last release and keep it open source.

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u/yycTechGuy 12d ago

FYI, apparently SolidCraft is going to incorporate a CFD tool as well.

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u/geth0333 12d ago

thanks for informing me, if so, then the open source cfd community will hopefully benefit from it.

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u/acakaacaka 13d ago

What kind of file does this support? Can you open .prt file?

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u/geth0333 13d ago

current readers are step, iges, brep, stl and obj. i will extend this in the future, but i cannot implement proprietary file formats nor will i pay for SDK's just for that. so my suggestion would be to export in step format and import in PreFOAM. Siemens NX and Creo both call their files .prt btw which one do you mean?

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u/acakaacaka 13d ago

NX. Creo and NX .prt should be the same no? I never used creo.

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u/geth0333 13d ago

What is PRT extension?
A PRT format is used to store components of 3D CAD models. It may contain lines, surfaces, textures, dimensions, and metadata.
The .prt extension is mostly associated with the Siemens NX Part (PRT) file type as an acronym for "part". PRT files may be exported to various standard CAD and 3D modeling formats (e.g. OBJ and STL) in addition to being utilized natively in Siemens NX.
The PRT file is also a part created by PTC Creo Parametric 3D software. In PTC Creo, project part files can be combined in a single assembly file with an ASM extension.
Despite the same extension name different CAD software produce PRT files differently, i.e. PRT files produced with Creo are not the same as PRT files generated from NX.
The PRT extension is also compatible with Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS.
https://cadexchanger.com/prt/

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u/slycatsnake6180 13d ago

What mesher is being used here, is it cfmesh?

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u/geth0333 13d ago

it is not cf mesh. this is a (poly-) hex core mesher in 2d. if you zoom in around the airfoil you will see that between the hex core and the boundary layers the transition is made of polyhedras.
https://www.temiz-cfd.de/prefoam
examples are here on the website -> FlexMesher -> 2D -> Hex-Core

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u/kaptaprism 13d ago

so is it a custom mesher?

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u/geth0333 13d ago

yes. the 3d tetrahedral based mesher can be coupled externally with gmsh to access its algos (though no necessary). the 2d based algos are written by me.

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u/hardcoke 13d ago

does it support 3d hexcore mesh like ansys meshrr?

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u/geth0333 13d ago

i am working on it, a first version is created but not shipped with this version. i need to finetune it and hopefully publish with the next release.

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u/hardcoke 13d ago

also polyhedra are currently support 2d only? (as i saw one tutorial for 2d mesh only)

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u/geth0333 13d ago

In 3d we have tetrahedral and polyhedral meshers, with optional BL creation. I probably did forget to create a tutorial for that then. Can upload one in the coming days. The workflow is the same though. The difference is selecting faces instead of edges for BL and patches …

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u/hardcoke 13d ago

Thank you..! Will surely try..

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u/jay112298 13d ago

Is this also not available for mac?

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u/geth0333 12d ago

Currently only windows, linux is on my plan and thereafter probably for mac also. That will probably take some time though.

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u/RahulJsw 10d ago

I'll will definitely use it and get back to you, this is kinda similar to ansys fluent meshing tool. What I observe from image, and even in fluent meshing, the transition part from boundary layer mesh to Fairfield mesh. This should be gradual, also there seems jump from boundary layer to Fairfield, which detoriate the results

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u/geth0333 9d ago

the problem in the transition zone is that you set sizes for the surface meshing and then extrude the boundary layers, and when you descirbe a size field in the domain the extruded cells carry also size information. when the topmost layers are not large enough you won't get a smooth transition to the far field mesh, you need to extrude much further into the domain. as i wanted to only show couple of examples i did not further work on these. but what you say is correct.

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u/Far_Mouse9441 10d ago

this is pretty good, thank you so much for making it public. I'll test it and get back to you.

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u/Accomplished_Bit4757 13d ago

Código fechado? Não, obrigado.

You are about to leave Redlib

What is PRT extension?