Publications

Description

Authors: Philip Cardiff, Ivan Batistić, Željko Tuković

Abstract: solids4foam is a toolbox designed for conducting solid mechanics and fluid-solid interaction simulations within the widely-used OpenFOAM software (ESI-OpenCFD, 2024; foam-extend, 2024; The OpenFOAM Foundation, 2024). The toolbox has a comprehensive set of features, including advanced algorithms for fluid-solid and thermo-fluid-solid coupling, a variety of solid material models, non-trivial solid boundary conditions, and numerous discretisation and solution methods for solid mechanics. 

The solids4foam toolbox is one of the most comprehensive solid mechanics and fluid-solid interaction toolboxes available within OpenFOAM, having evolved from the solidMechanics and extend-bazaar/FluidSolidInteraction toolboxes of the foam-extend community (foamextend, 2024). Several other OpenFOAM-based toolboxes provide capabilities for solid mechanics and fluid-solid interaction, including FOAM-FSI (Mehl et al., 2016), miniGeotechFoam (Tang et al., 2015), explicitSolidDynamics Haider et al. (2018), as well as more specialised solvers such as the membrane fluid-solid interaction solver (Wagner et al., 2022), a coupled actuator line and finite element analysis tool (Schmitt & Robinson, 2022), and a modular multiphysics framework (St-Onge & Olivier, 2023). However, many of these toolboxes are no longer actively maintained and lack the broad range of solid mechanics and fluid-solid interaction features required for general-purpose simulations. Beyond OpenFOAM-based solutions, preCICE (Chourdakis et al., 2023) provides an alternative approach by coupling OpenFOAM with widely-used finite element solvers such as deal.II (Arndt et al., 2021), CalculiX (Dhondt,2004), FEniCS (Logg et al., 2012), and Code_Aster (France, 1989--2017), enabling flexible multiphysics simulations. While solids4foam is among the first general finite volume-based toolboxes for solid mechanics and fluid-solid interaction, established finite element-based codes such as FEniCS (Logg et al., 2012) and deal.II (Arndt et al., 2021) offer comparable functionality but differ in their numerical methodology. Furthermore, domain-specific fluidsolid interaction solvers, such as SimVascular (Zhu et al., 2022) and Ambit (Hirschvogel,2024) for cardiovascular simulations or turtlefluid-solid interaction (Bergersen et al., 2020) for general monolithic fluid-solid interaction problems, provide specialised solutions for particular applications. Despite these alternatives, solids4foam remains a uniquely positioned toolbox within OpenFOAM, offering a well-maintained and feature-rich platform for solid mechanics and fluid-solid interaction simulations based on the finite volume method.