Udemy – OpenFOAM for Beginners: From Installation to Real Simulation

This course is a step-by-step OpenFOAM beginner training designed to take you from installation to running your first real CFD simulations with confidence — even if you’ve never used OpenFOAM before. We start slowly and clearly, so you understand the OpenFOAM workflow without feeling overwhelmed. Then we move into real projects where you learn by doing: create the mesh, set boundary conditions, run the solver, and visualize the results in ParaView.

What you’ll do in this course

You will build several complete simulations from scratch, including:

• Lid-Driven Cavity — your first full OpenFOAM workflow (mesh → setup → run → post-process)
• Internal flow in an elbow — including converting a Fluent mesh to OpenFOAM
• Flow around a square cylinder — learn blockMesh, grading (non-uniform mesh), and Reynolds-number-based setup
• Turbulence modeling around the square cylinder — practical setup of turbulence files and running a turbulent solver
• Salome meshing for OpenFOAM — geometry → meshing → converting the mesh into OpenFOAM
• Multiphase simulation (Dam Break) using interFoam — including setFields and volume fraction (alpha)

Skills you’ll learn (from zero to practical)

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Understand the OpenFOAM case structure (0 / constant / system)
• Create meshes (uniform and non-uniform graded meshes)
• Set correct boundary and initial conditions
• Configure the main dictionaries (controlDict, fvSchemes, fvSolution)
• Run simulations and understand solver logs (so you can fix common mistakes)
• Post-process results in ParaView/paraFoam (fields, streamlines, plots)
• Run cases in parallel (decomposePar) for faster simulation

Who this course is for:

• Complete beginners who want a clear start with OpenFOAM
• Engineering students learning CFD workflow in practice
• Anyone who wants hands-on OpenFOAM projects instead of just theory
• Engineers who want to learn OpenFOAM as an open-source CFD tool (no prior OpenFOAM required)

Requirements:

• No OpenFOAM knowledge needed
• Basic engineering background is helpful, but not required
• A Windows or Linux computer (Windows users will use WSL)