CFD Processor is a library – a set of routines – which is designed for

• straightforward setup of OpenFOAM cases
• automatic running of calculations
• complex postprocessing of the calculated results.

Internally, it uses the free OpenFOAM toolbox – meshers, solvers and utilities – but saves the user from filling up large amount of necessary configuration files and managing the workflow of the computation. For this particular usage, a pair of plugins for the widely used ParaView http://www.paraview.org/(www.paraview.org) visualization software has been developed. The two ParaView plugins TCFDSource and TCFDManager serve as a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for TCFD and both of them are described in this manual.

• TCFDSource is used for an ease of use CFD case setup.
• TCFDManager is used for an user friendly CFD simulation control.

CFD Processor solves for physical volume fields in a finite volume mesh created inside of a given boundary geometry. The machine is generally composed of several components (e.g. inlet piping, rotor, stator, outlet piping) that are meshed individually and have different construction properties. For the usage in CFD Processor each component should be provided separately as a set of non-overlapping ASCII STL (Stereo Lithography) geometry model files, which – put together – form the water-tight boundary geometry of the component’s volume or the external computational mesh of each component can be imported. The summarized CFD Processor workflow is

• [1.] Computational mesh generation – a brand new mesh can be generated on given STL files or the external computational mesh can be imported.
• [2.] Simulation phase – it is possible to setup and simulate the whole machine characteristics (working points) in one simulation (e.g. different flow rates, different RPMs, different pressure ratios, etc.).
• [3.] Results evaluation – the output is an html report with plots of interesting variables and colored pictures (e.g. blade-to-blade views, meridional averages, etc.).

The third step can be done independently of the other two. It makes sense to run the post-processing stage even after the first point of the machine characteristics – to obtain detailed mesh information and interesting results of the first point (e.g. efficiency, pressure drop/rise, torque, etc.) in the synoptic html report.