foam-extend4.1-coherent-io/ReleaseNotes

#                            -*- mode: org; -*-
#
#+TITLE:             *Release notes for foam-extend-4.1*
#+TITLE:                  *Version 4.01 - Duisburg*
#+AUTHOR:                foam-extend administrators:
#+AUTHOR:                        Hrvoje Jasak
#+AUTHOR:                       Håkan Nilsson
#+AUTHOR:                       Henrik Rusche
#+AUTHOR:                      Martin Beaudoin
#+AUTHOR:                     Bernhard Gschaider
#+DATE:                          December 2016
#+LINK:                     http://foam-extend.org
#+OPTIONS: author:nil
#+OPTIONS: toc:2
#+OPTIONS: _:nil
#+OPTIONS: ^:nil

###############################################################################

** Overview
  The foam-extend project is a fork of the OpenFOAM® open source
  library for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). It is an open
  project welcoming and integrating contributions from all users and
  developers. Previously known as OpenFOAM-dev and OpenFOAM-extend,
  it contains bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as
  extensions and additional features provided by community
  contributors (see file ListOfContributors).
  For a full list, see below and previous release notes at:
  http://sourceforge.net/p/foam-extend/wiki/Home/

  Version 4.1, nicknamed "Duisburg", is the current version of
  foam-extend. The release continues the tradition and spirit of the
  original FOAM code developed by prof. Jasak and Mr. Weller during
  their time at Imperial College and released as the general purpose
  CFD/CCM package by Nabla Ltd. in 2000. In this spirit, we reverted
  18 December 2013 to the original numbering scheme (foam-2.3.2, 13
  December 2004) as release number 3.0.  Visit http://foam-extend.org
  for more information.

  OPENFOAM is a registered trademark of ESI Group. OpenFOAM-extend and
  foam-extend are a community effort not endorsed by ESI Group.


  This is a major release of foam-extend-4.1 created form the nextRelease branch of foam-extend-4.0 which consolidates cumulative development since 2016.

** Installation
   foam-extend-4.0 can be compiled and runs on a large variety of Linux, Mac or Windows
   systems

  * Main supported OSs:
    - Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
    - Mac OS X
    - Microsoft Windows 10

  * Compile from source:

    Please refer to doc/buildInstructions/ for details. Further
    installation instruction are available on the unofficial OpenFOAM
    Wiki:
    http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Installation/Linux/foam-extend-4.1
    If you have improvements or build instructions for a new system,
    please share them with the community (see section "How to
    contribute", below).

  * Download binary packages:

    Binary packages are available for download at
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/foam-extend/ for the following
    systems: Ubuntu 18.04, Mac OS X and Windows 10.

  * Accompanying ThirdParty software:
    - gcc compatibility up to 7.4.0
    - bison 2.7
    - cmake 3.11.4
    - flex-2.5.35
    - hwloc 2.0.1
    - libccmio 2.6.1
    - mesquite 2.3.0
    - metis 5.1.0
    - openmpi 1.8.8
    - parmetis 4.0.3
    - ParMGridGen 1.0
    - PyFoam 0.6.4
    - scotch 6.0.4
    - pyFoam 0.6.9


The code has been developed on Ubuntu-18.04.  It is natively compiled on Linux, Mac OSX and Microsoft Windows 10.

The code is packaged for Ubuntu-18.04 MAc OSX and Windows 10.

** Compatibility
  Upstream features from the OpenFOAM® code base are merged into
  foam-extend on regular basis. The interface format of
  foam-extend-4.1 is largely compatible to foam-extend-4.0, to
  OpenFOAM-1.6-ext and OpenFOAM-1.7.x. In some cases, the
  differences are caused by bug fixes and algorithmic improvements,
  considered more important than inter-operability.

** Main differentiators between foam-extend and OpenFOAM
  A large number of features have been lost within the release of
  OpenFOAM since version 1.3, the code base has shrunk by more than
  40%.  While we understand the lack of technical ability of
  supporting advanced CFD features, we feel that existing features and
  specifically large-scale contributions should remain active and
  developed further. Below is a list of main features of foam-extend
  which are lacking, lost, deactivated or unusable in ESI releases:

  * Turbomachinery features, including General Grid Interface (GGI),
    partial overlap GGI, cyclic GGI, with improvements in parallel
    scaling.  First release of a mixing plane stage interface

  * Dynamic mesh with topological changes Sliding interfaces, mesh
    layering, attach-detach boundaries etc.  In foam-extend, full
    parallel support for topological changes is released for the first
    time

  * Finite Element Method with support for polyhedral meshes This is
    mainly used in mesh deformation and over the last 15 years it has
    proven vastly superior to all other dynamic mesh methods.

  * Advanced mesh deformation technology Including tet FEM mesh
    deformation, Radial Basis Function (RBF) mesh deformation,
    tetrahedral remeshing dynamic mesh support and solid body motion
    functions.  All of the above include parallelisation support

  * Library of dynamic meshes with topological changes with full
    second order FVM discretisation support on moving meshes with
    topological changes

  * Internal combustion engine-specific dynamic mesh classes such as
    two-stroke engine and various forms of 4-stroke and multi-valve
    dynamic mesh classes

  * Finite Area Method providing support for FVM-like discretisation
    on a curved surface in 3-D, with examples of liquid film modeling

  * Block-coupled matrix support, allowing fully implicit
    multi-equation solution of NxN equation sets, with full
    parallelisation support.  First release of a block-AMG linear
    equation solver

  * Fully implicit conjugate-coupled solution framework, allowing
    implicit solution fo multiple equations over multiple meshes, with
    parallelism

  * Proper Orthogonal Decomposition data analysis tools, with
    applications to FOAM field classes

  * Equation reader classes and tutorials

  * Multi-solver solution framework, allowing multiple field models to
    be solved in a coupled manner

  * A major contribution is solid mechanics modelling, including
    linear and non-linear materials, contact, self-contact and
    friction, with updated Lagrangian or absolute Lagrangian
    formulation.  Solution of damage models and crack propagation in
    complex materials via topological changes

  * CUDA solver release, provided in full source and as an example of
    coupling external linear equation solvers with FOAM

  * Library-level support for Immersed Boundary Method and Overset
    Mesh

  * Major improvements in accuracy and stability of FVM discretisation
    with options on convection and diffusion discretisation, deferred
    correction or explicit schemes

  * Algebraic multigrid solver framework

  * 267 tutorials with automated run scripts

  * Automatic test harness

  * Approximately 6000 bug fixes in fundamental level libraries and
    discretisation techniques

** New features in foam-extend-4.1, since foam-extend-4.0
  The list of features is a result of the work of numerous
  contributors. The maintainers of foam-extend would formally like to
  thank them all.

  Get a full log of the updates by (either):
#+BEGIN_SRC bash
    user@machine> git log 4.0.. > commitLog
#+END_SRC
#+BEGIN_SRC bash
    user@machine> git log 4.0.. --oneline > commitLog
#+END_SRC
#+BEGIN_SRC bash
    user@machine> gitg 4.0..
#+END_SRC

  * Major new features:

    - Numerics
      - Block-coupled pressure velocity solver for steady and transient simulations of incompressible turbulent fluid flow.  Fully implicit handling of porosity and MRF in block-coupled solvers
      - Immersed Boundary Surface Method.  Support for turbulence, dynamic immersed boundary and adaptive polyhedral refinement on immersed bondary meshes
      - Overset Mesh Method.  New automatic overset mesh fringe calculation algorithms.  Major performance improvement for parallel overset and GGI interfaces
      - Consistent SIMPLE and PISO segregated algorithms, where the solution is independent of time-step size or relaxation parameters
      - New formulation of buoyant Bousinesq approximation solver
      - Incremental development of the Finite Area Method and liquid film solver

    - Turbulence Modelling
      - Full library of rough and non-equilibrium wall functions
      - Block-coupled k-epsilon and k-omega SST turbulence models for fast non-linear convergence

    - Dynamic Mesh Support
      - Polyhedral adaptive mesh refinement and coarsening, working on all cell types
      - Dynamic load balancing for parallel topologically changing meshes
      - Rewrite of the 6-DOF ODE solver, working directly on the rotation matrix.  Implementation of constraints and restraints in the 6-DOF solver

    - Linear algebra
      - Selective algebraic multigrid solver (AMG) with support for non-M matrices, GGI interfaces and other coupled boundary types
      - Block-algebraic multigrid solver development for block coupled systems, with support for coupled interfaces
      - ILUC0 preconditoning for polyhedral and coarse AMG meshes, using Crout's algorithm

  * Software
    - Optional Cmake buid environment
    - Port to ARM 8 HPC arcihecture
    - Port fo Cray XD40 supercomputer
  * Installation:
    - Compilation improvements
    - Updated packages versions and compilation in ThirdParty
    - Updated compilation for latest version of XCode for Mac OSX
    - Updates for MS Windows build

  * New tutorials: 267 in total

  * Bug fixes: see git log for details

  * In total, the release consists of 1450 commits since the last release

** Reporting bugs
    To report bugs, please use the bugtracker at
    http://sourceforge.net/p/foam-extend/tickets/

** How to contribute
    All your contributions are highly welcome: New solvers, utilities and
    models; bug fixes; documentation. The many ways of contributing and the
    contribution process are described in detail at:
    http://sourceforge.net/p/foam-extend/wiki/HowToContribute/

** List of Contributors:
    See file ListOfContributors