code_saturne — The Complete Guide: Industrial CFD From EDF With a Graphical Interface, Free
code_saturne is a general-purpose CFD solver developed by the French electricity utility EDF for its own engineering needs — power plants, heat exchangers and ventilation — and released as open source. It solves the Navier-Stokes equations with scalar transport in 2D and 3D, steady or unsteady, laminar or turbulent.
Code_Saturne
EDF
General-purpose CFD from EDF — turbulence, heat transfer, combustion and multiphase, with a GUI.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- A range of turbulence models — from k-epsilon and k-omega SST to Reynolds-stress models and LES.
- Heat transfer — non-isothermal flow, including radiation and conjugate heat transfer with solids.
- Specialised physics — combustion, multiphase flow and atmospheric flow.
- Unstructured meshes — almost any cell type, including non-conforming meshes.
- Graphical interface — set up the case, boundary conditions and run parameters without editing text files.
Who it suits
Mechanical, energy and process engineers who want an industry-proven solver with a friendlier interface than OpenFOAM. It runs mainly on Linux; build the geometry and mesh in SALOME or Gmsh, and view results in ParaView.
Related tools
For the widest range of solvers and a large community — OpenFOAM. For compressible aerodynamics — SU2. For structural analysis in the same EDF ecosystem — code_aster.
OpenFOAM
OpenFOAM Foundation
Comprehensive CFD solvers — flow, turbulence, heat transfer and multiphase. Text-file driven, no GUI.
Get it from the vendor
SALOME
CEA / EDF / OPEN CASCADE
Geometry, meshing and post-processing platform for FEA, around external solvers.
Get it from the vendor
Code_Aster
EDF
EDF industrial finite element solver — nonlinear, dynamic and thermo-mechanical, open source.
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
code_saturne is industrial-grade CFD, free even for commercial work, and especially well suited to thermal flows and to anyone already working in SALOME.