OpenFOAM.

• What are the coolant flow distribution, pressure drop and wall heat-transfer coefficients in a blanket, divertor or first-wall cooling channel?
• Where do hot spots form when a coolant loop exchanges heat with the surrounding structure (conjugate heat transfer)?
• How does a two-phase cooling circuit respond to a transient such as a loss of flow?

• Finite-volume CFD on unstructured polyhedral meshes, incompressible and compressible
• RANS and LES turbulence modelling
• Multiphase flow (volume-of-fluid, Euler–Euler with boiling and condensation)
• Heat transfer and conjugate heat transfer, thermal radiation
• Combustion, Lagrangian particles, linear-elastic solid mechanics
• Dynamic and rotating meshes; MPI parallelism

Limitations

The two release lines (and the foam-extend fork) are not interchangeable: solver names, input conventions and tutorials differ. There is no graphical interface, post-processing relies on ParaView, and binary packaging is limited to a few Linux distributions with Windows and macOS via virtualisation. Validation, mesh quality and model selection are the user's responsibility.

General-purpose CFD, not a fusion code. It is the open-source workhorse for thermal-hydraulic questions around a reactor: coolant flow through blanket, divertor and vessel channels, conjugate heat transfer, buoyancy-driven flows and basic stress checks. Liquid-metal MHD, neutron heating sources and tritium transport are not standard features of either line and come from user models or coupling to other codes.

Distribution note

This entry documents the OpenFOAM Foundation line (openfoam.org, GitHub OpenFOAM/OpenFOAM-14, OpenFOAM 14 of July 2026). The OpenCFD/Keysight line (openfoam.com, GitLab openfoam/core/openfoam, v2606 of June 2026) is a distinct distribution with its own repositories, solver architecture and container images; the Hub's current container image (opencfd/openfoam-default) belongs to the OpenCFD line. The two are not interchangeable.

Published by the project itself. These are the project's own tutorials, not Morton Labs runs.

• User Guide 2.1: Backward-facing step (Foundation line) — Steady 2D turbulent flow with the incompressibleFluid solver module and k-epsilon.
• User Guide 2.2: Breaking of a dam (Foundation line) — Transient two-phase free-surface case run in parallel.
• Rotating mesh fan tutorial (OpenCFD line, v2606) — snappyHexMesh with a rotating zone and AMI, run with pimpleFoam.

No reference workflow documents this tool yet. Its evidence status is “Listed”: A reviewed catalog entry with upstream links.

Developed by The OpenFOAM Foundation Ltd (not-for-profit distributor, code produced by CFD Direct) for the openfoam.org line; OpenCFD Ltd (a Keysight subsidiary, formerly ESI) for the openfoam.com line. No individual profiles are published for this project yet.

Roles name a specific relationship with evidence. Authorship of a paper is not maintainership, and a listed person is not a Morton Labs partner or endorser.

• Awesome Nuclear — Curated by Paul Romano and contributors