Channelflow — The Complete Guide: Spectral Simulation of Channel Turbulence
Channelflow is open-source (GPL) C++ software for numerical analysis of incompressible flow in channel geometry: Couette flow, Poiseuille flow and boundary layers. It uses accurate spectral methods and runs in parallel with MPI. It is now maintained by a lab at EPFL, after originally being developed by John F. Gibson.
Channelflow
EPFL ECPS lab (originally John F. Gibson)
Spectral simulation of incompressible channel flow, for analysing turbulence and coherent states.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Direct simulation — Navier-Stokes in a channel with spectral accuracy.
- Equilibrium solutions — steady states of the flow found with Newton methods.
- Travelling waves and periodic orbits — coherent solutions embedded in turbulence.
- Parameter continuation — tracking a solution as Reynolds number or box size change.
- Parallel computing — MPI runs on a cluster.
Who it suits
This is a research code, not engineering CFD software. It suits turbulence and dynamical-systems researchers and graduate students. There is no graphical interface, geometry is limited to channels, and you work on Linux: compile from source, write commands and C++ programs, and view fields in an external tool. Anyone needing flow around a real body needs a different tool.
Related tools
For spectral/hp element methods on general geometry — Nektar++. For high-order CFD on GPUs — PyFR. For a general-purpose engineering solver — OpenFOAM.
Nektar++
Imperial College London / University of Utah
A spectral/hp element framework for high-accuracy simulation.
Get it from the vendor
PyFR
PyFR team (Imperial College London)
High-order CFD solver using Flux Reconstruction, running on GPUs as well as ordinary CPUs.
Get it from the vendor
OpenFOAM
OpenFOAM Foundation
Comprehensive CFD solvers — flow, turbulence, heat transfer and multiphase. Text-file driven, no GUI.
Get it from the vendor
ParaView
Kitware / Sandia / Los Alamos
Large-scale simulation post-processing — slices, streamlines and animation.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Channelflow is a precise, niche tool for studying the structure of channel turbulence. For researchers it is free and fully open; for an engineer on a project it is almost never the right choice.