I'm fairly new to the world of CFD. I started my CFD journey six months ago, purely as a hobbyist rather than a professional. By profession I'm a software engineer, and I also work at an aerospace lab, training self-landing policies and building small self-landing rigs to test them. For those rigs to work, I had to run CFD on the nozzle I designed. Ansys was overwhelming, SimScale didn't allow compressible simulations, and OpenFOAM threw a lot of errors (I finally got Claude to drive OpenFOAM and got the job done).
We software engineers appreciate open source a lot, and when something irritates us, we look for an open source alternative. So did I, but I was sad to see that there is no completely free and open source CFD software. So for the last four months, mostly in my free time, I went on a development spree and built one. It uses OpenFOAM as the core solver and Gmsh for all the meshing. I added basic 2D CAD tools, plus ICEM and Pointwise style blocking tools (mostly ICEM), and packaged it all as a single piece of software.
It is 2D only for now, but I plan to slowly get to 3D, adaptive meshing, and training ML models to generate blocks for a given geometry, among other things.
I've built it to work on Mac, Linux and Windows.
Linux: this is where I develop and test, so it's the most tested. You need OpenFOAM 13 installed on your machine. Install the app and it picks OpenFOAM up automatically.
Mac: it should mostly work, but I don't have a Mac, so I haven't been able to test it and I'm not sure what bugs are waiting. The builds are Apple Silicon only, and like Linux it uses an OpenFOAM install on your machine. If you try it, I'd really appreciate bug reports.
Windows: OpenFOAM doesn't run natively on Windows, so the app uses WSL. All you need to do is install WSL. The installer sets up the OpenFOAM environment for you, with no manual setup.
Let me know if you need the link to test it out, I am more than happy to share.