Introduction to OpenFOAM and HydrothermalFoam

Welcome to the DOME short course on hydrothermal flow modeling. The course intends to provide you with a hands-on experience on how we can use numerical methods to investigate the inner workings of submarine hydrothermal systems. For this we will use the popular Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package OpenFOAM , which mainly adresses Navier-Stokes-type fluiddynamic problems. In addition, we will have a look at HydrothermalFoam, a custom solver for flow in porous media developed at GEOMAR, which allows resolving hydrothermal convection in submarine settings.

Course content

These are the main topics:

1. Getting started with OpenFOAM and HydrothermalFoam

2. Direct simulations of flow on the pore scale

3. Upscaled porous flow modeling and submarine hydrothermal systems

Open access!

Note that OpenFOAM and HydrothermalFoam are open source and can be freely used for your research.

Instructors

Prof. Lars Ruepke

• Email: lruepke@geomar.de

• Institute webpage

Course website

You can find additional lectures and information on our teaching website:

• Public site : https://lruepke.github.io/HTF_lecture/

Further readings

There are many good online resources on OpenFOAM, HydrothermalFoam, and numerical modeling in marine geosciences:

• Cyprien Soulaine’s teaching material http://cypriensoulaine.com

• Official OpenFoam documentation https://cfd.direct/openfoam/documentation/

• Material shared by Tobias Holzmann https://holzmann-cfd.com

• OpenFoam code documentation https://cpp.openfoam.org/v10/

• CFD Forum https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/

Lecture 1

• Lecture overview
• Installation guide
  • Docker
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Paraview
  • Python
• Getting started with OpenFoam
  • Why use OpenFoam
  • The OpenFoam workflow
• A first test case - heat diffusion
  • Theory
  • Prepare case files
  • Mesh generation
  • Boundary conditions
  • Transport properties
  • Case control
  • Running the case

Lecture 2

• Lecture overview
  • Introduction
• Intro to flow in porous media
  • Direct simulations
  • Continuum approach
• Flow on the pore scale
  • Digital Rock Physics - Effective Permeability of Rocks
  • Mesh generation
  • OpenFOAM case
• Exercises
  • Vertical versus horizontal permeability
  • Changes to the geometry
  • Adding scalar transport

Lecture 3

• Lecture overview
• Porous Flow - Submarine Hydrothermal Systems
  • What is the permeability of seafloor?
  • Theory: Hydrothermal convection
  • Implementation
  • Equation-of-state
• Hydrothermal convection test case
  • Prepare case files
  • Equation of state and thermophysical properties
  • Mesh generation
  • Boundary conditions
  • Permeability
  • Case control
  • Running the case
• Excercises
  • Constant temperature 1-layer system
  • Constant temperature 2-layer system

References

• References