Fluidity — The Complete Guide: Free Adaptive-Mesh CFD for Ocean and Geophysical Flow
Fluidity is an open-source flow solver from Imperial College London that solves the Navier-Stokes equations with a finite element / control volume method on unstructured meshes. Its standout feature: the mesh refines and moves during the run, so resolution concentrates where the physics is happening.
Fluidity
Imperial College London
A CFD solver with adaptive unstructured meshes, from Imperial College London.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Anisotropic mesh adaptivity — cells stretched along fronts and currents, with fewer cells elsewhere in the domain.
- Geophysical flow — ocean models, tsunami waves and mantle convection.
- Multiphase flow — including flow through porous media.
- Set-up tools — the Diamond interface for building the options file, and a Python interface for fields and boundary conditions.
- Parallel computing — MPI, up to thousands of processors.
Who it suits
Researchers and graduate students in environmental engineering, oceanography and geophysics who need variable resolution over a large domain. Fluidity runs on Linux only and requires comfort with the command line. For everyday engineering work, a general solver with a large community is a better fit.
Related tools
For general CFD — OpenFOAM. For engineering-level coastal and river models — TELEMAC-MASCARET or Delft3D. To view the results — ParaView.
OpenFOAM
OpenFOAM Foundation
Comprehensive CFD solvers — flow, turbulence, heat transfer and multiphase. Text-file driven, no GUI.
Get it from the vendor
TELEMAC-MASCARET
EDF / Consortium
Hydrodynamic system for rivers and coasts on unstructured meshes — flow, waves, sediment and quality.
Get it from the vendorDelft3D
Deltares
Coastal and marine engineering — currents, waves, sediment transport and shoreline morphology.
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
Fluidity is a powerful research tool for geophysical flows with a smart mesh — completely free, including for commercial use.