for visualization The name
FOAM has been claimed to appear for the first time as a post-processing tool written by Charlie Hill, in the early 90s in Prof.
David Gosman's group in
Imperial College London. As a counter argument , it has been claimed that Henry Weller created the FOAM library for field operation and manipulation which interfaced to the GUISE (Graphical User Interface Software Environment) which was created by Charlie Hill for interfacing to
AVS. As a continuum mechanics / computational fluid dynamics tool, the first development of FOAM (which became OpenFOAM later on) was virtually always presumed to be initiated by Henry Weller at the same institute by using the
C++ programming language rather than the
de facto standard programming language
FORTRAN of the time to develop a powerful and flexible general simulation platform. From this initiation to the founding of a company called Nabla Ltd, (predominantly) Henry Weller and Hrvoje Jasak carried out the basic development of the software for almost a decade. For a few years, FOAM was sold as a commercial code by Nabla Ltd., on 10 December 2004, it was released under
GPL and renamed to OpenFOAM. In 2004, Nabla Ltd was folded. Immediately afterwards, Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields and Mattijs Janssens founded OpenCFD Ltd to develop and release OpenFOAM. At the same time, Hrvoje Jasak founded the consulting company Wikki Ltd and maintained a
fork of OpenFOAM called openfoam-extend, later renamed to foam-extend. In December 2010, the OpenFOAM development moved to using
GitHub for its source code repository. On 5 August 2011, OpenCFD transferred its copyrights and interests in OpenFOAM (
source code) and documentation to the newly incorporated OpenFOAM Foundation Inc., registered in the state of Delaware, USA. On 8 August 2011, OpenCFD was acquired by
Silicon Graphics International (SGI). On 12 September 2012,
ESI Group announced the acquisition of OpenCFD Ltd, becoming a
wholly-owned subsidiary of ESI Group, and OpenCFD retaining its ownership of the OpenFOAM trademark. On 25 April 2014, The OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd was incorporated in England, as a
company limited by guarantee with all assets transferred to the UK and the US entity dissolved, together with changes to the governance of the Foundation. Weller and Greenshields left OpenCFD and formed CFD Direct Ltd in March 2015. On 3 September 2024, Cristel de Rouvray, CEO of
ESI Group (acquired by
Keysight Technologies Inc) officially resigned as Founder Member and director of The OpenFOAM Foundation Limited. The OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd directors are Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields, and Brendan Bouffler. The following are the three main variants of OpenFOAM: • OpenFOAM, Foundation, developed and maintained primarily by CFD Direct Ltd with a
sequence based identifier (e.g. 6.0) (from 2011). • OpenFOAM, OpenCFD, developed and maintained mainly by OpenCFD Ltd, (ESI Group company since 2012) with a
date-of-release identifier (e.g. v1606) (from 2016). • The FOAM-Extend Project, mainly maintained by Wikki Ltd. (from 2009).
OpenFOAM Governance In 2018, OpenCFD Ltd. and some of its industrial, academic, and community partners established an administrative body, i.e.
OpenFOAM Governance, to allow the OpenFOAM's user community to decide/contribute the future development and direction of their variant of the software. The structure of OpenFOAM Governance consisted of a
Steering Committee and various
Technical Committees. The Steering Committee comprised representatives from the main sponsors of OpenFOAM in industry, academia, release authorities and consultant organisations. The organisation composition of the initial committee involved members from OpenCFD Ltd.,
ESI Group,
Volkswagen,
General Motors,
FM Global, TotalSim Ltd.,
TU Darmstadt, and Wikki Ltd. In addition, nine technical committees were established in the following areas: Documentation,
high performance computing,
meshing,
multiphase,
numerics,
optimisation,
turbulence,
marine applications, and
nuclear applications with the members from the organisations of OpenCFD Ltd.,
CINECA,
University of Zagreb,
TU Darmstadt,
National Technical University of Athens, Upstream CFD GmbH,
University of Michigan, and
EPFL. ==Structure==