Rotating Flow Simulations with OpenFOAM

Rotating flow problems have a wide range of applications in several technical fields, e.g. gas turbines, water turbines, wind turbines, aircraft engines, chemical engineering, process engineering, or medical devices. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has gain significant importance for the physical analysis and mechanical design of rotating flow systems. Beside commercial tools open source tools like openFOAM have become more and more accepted in academia and also in industry in the last years. In the present paper, we discuss the treatment of rotating flow systems in general and focus especially on openFOAM simulations. The distinction between Single Reference Frame (SRF) and Multi Reference Frame (MRF) simulations is explained for steady and unsteady flow problems. In particular the handling of interfaces between fixed and rotating flow regions is discussed. The purpose of the present paper is, to give an overview of the different techniques available in openFOAM for simulation of rotating flow problems. It is stated that unsteady flow simulations are much more time consuming compared to frozen rotor simulations or mixing plane techniques. Consequently, steady-state simulation techniques should be considered, whenever a steady-state physical flow field solution is expected.