Demonstrate use of OpenFOAM in responding to a question

[time-trader]

Support request

About me

Octue user, developing a digital twin for HAWT under AeroSense project.

Request

FSI Module is the overarching service for running simulations and retrieving results, which should be called by other parts of Aerosense.

[time-trader]

Current state:

Currently FSI Twin is merely a python script that:

• Generates a list of dicts to be used as an input
• Iterates over the inputs.
  • Launches a local child twin using Runner().run()
  • Writes results.output_values json to the drive and adds the file to the manifest, with tags based on the input

[thclark]

This is going to be extremely relevant as it's essentially a use case for the issues solved by #46 which is in progress now.

@time-trader before we finish #46 (it'll be released in 0.1.8, you can track progress in #68) we'll head over to your repositories on gitlab and make sure we fully cover your use case. What extra data, if any, would we need to run the services you're defining there?

[time-trader]

@thclark The twins in question are foam_2d_twine (dev branch), and FSI-Simulation.
to plot results I run post-processing_twine separately for now.
All the data: twine, inputs and cofig jsons are included. (There is also template mesh and foam configuration file but you would need openFoam installed on your system though, so you can replace the foam calls in the app with just randomly assigned output. I should probably include compiled solvers in future?)

[thclark]

@time-trader I'll dockerise it for you so it'll work cloud-side and so the installation is repeatable.

If you had any particular steps or guides for installing OF that you found useful, drop them here otherwise we'll probably be fine without!

[time-trader]

No, I installed OpenFOAM straight from their repo. https://openfoam.org/version/8/

[thclark]

Outdated but a good general guide.

OpenFOAM's documentation has relocated since I last used it in 2009ish... but they still have the knack of making it completely unintelligible to anyone anywhere on the human-robot spectrum

There are images are on dockerhub so I can base on those, although the concept of tagging has clearly passed all of the various maintainers completely by 😭

And @cortadocodes since we were thinking of things liable to be completely screwed up by Apple Silicon I'd bet the gold bar under my mattress that this will be, OpenFOAM is has a combination of a wide range of extreme tweaks and optimisations as well as quite a bit of legacy code. We'll have to see.

[time-trader]

Careful, because OpenFOAM was forked.. so there is one by ESI and one by OpenFOAM Foundation. We used the later. But for basic things they are same.

[thclark]

Gotcha, yes I was thinking the OpenFOAM Foundation docker images looked a bit more sensible so relieved that they seem to be a bit more sorted overall.

[time-trader]

@thclark It totally slipped my mind that I actually changed some of the OpenFOAM code to include a rough wall extension to k⁻omega turbulence model: https://github.com/time-trader/OpenFOAM-8/tree/master/src/MomentumTransportModels/momentumTransportModels

But I guess I can just wmake from new source once the docker container is up?

[thclark]

So docker doesn't work quite like that - the idea is that you build an image with everything pre-compiled and then the container is 'stateless', a glorious sounding concept that arises from the fact that any computer in the cloud can crap out at any time for no reason, and basically means "don't store important stuff in the container".

Compiling once a container is running would be a violation of this, because a) it's a long process (so boot time would be intense, it has to be redone on every boot) and b) it'd change the way the container behaves in response to inbound traffic (i.e. changes the state of the container, making it stateful).

Computer science lesson over. You can ignore the above if not interested.

Practically speaking, what we'll do is build an image with your compiled version of OpenFOAM in it, so basically we'll put your wmake commands in a dockerfile and away we go!

Can you paste the compilation commands etc that you used (from your terminal history, or if you've a script)? Doesn't matter if they're exact but if you can get me mostly there... :)

[time-trader]

I just cd /openfoam8/src/MomentumTransportModels/momentumTransportModels/
and then wmake
it makes new lib libmomentumTransportModels.so at my user folder.