Development of a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for OpenFOAM

Abstract

OpenFOAM is a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) toolbox, with libraries, utilities and solvers. It is a powerful tool that is intended to be used in text command environment, usually in a linux O.S. It is useful for creating scripts for complex simulations. But it makes the learning curve very steep, principally for first grades students.There are some GUI in the market, some of then Open Source (Helyx OS) but they have some limitations and there is a lack of control on the underlying package.Additionally, it is available the package pyFoam, a python interface created to interact with OpenFOAM from a python program.The purpose of this project is to start the development of a GUI, probably based on python (pyFoam and pyQt) that could help the students to learn how to use the OpenFOAM package.The student has to learn OpenFOAM, pyFoam and python, decide the design of the GUI application and stablish the base for the development of the GUI. It has to be modular, so that it could be possible to add features and, also, it has to be correctly documented, since it will be continued with future projects.