Sponsored by:
Benefactors:
The primary objective of the blueCFD-Core project is to bring OpenFOAM technology to run natively in Microsoft Windows, as an open source collaboration with and for these communities.
Contributions and collaboration are very much welcome and are open to anyone.
Any source code changes will be made public at the blueCFD project page, with associated documentation provided at or linked from the User Guides page.
Changes made to the project’s supported ports, will be submitted to the respective upstream project.
Documentation will be made as open as possible, with the primary target located at openfoamwiki.net. The local User Guides page will act as auxiliary documentation.
Beyond the mission statement, this project aims to achieve the following goals:
Be able to compile from source code and install OpenFOAM technology on Microsoft Windows as easily as done on Linux Distributions. This is primarily done by relying on MSys2 as a development infrastructure. Resulting binaries can be used independently from MSys2.
Provide an easy way to install pre-built binaries, either through one-click installers or through MSys2 package manager.
Remove hurdles towards making OpenFOAM technology more common on Windows, just as in any Linux Distribution.
To collaborate with the upstream projects for which porting efforts have been made, so that the efforts for the blueCFD-Core project are reduced to simple maintenance or even to eliminate the need for any additional porting efforts.
To promote and embrace community efforts, as well as to respect original authorship and copyrights.
To improve quality and performance.
blueCFD® product/service was first launched by blueCAPE in 11th of November of 2009. It was re-branded in November 2013 to blueCFD-Core, as blueCAPE’s offerings had expanded into more products and services.
On the 15th of December 2011, the blueCFD-SingleCore project had been released, with the objective to provide the source code and a basic feature set of blueCFD-Core, without MSys and MPI support.
blueCFD® is registered as a trade mark by blueCAPE Lda, since October 2012.
In November 2013, with blueCAPE’s launch of blueCFD®-AIR, the original blueCFD was re-branded to blueCFD®-Core.
On the 22nd of March 2016, blueCAPE released blueCFD-Core 2.3-1 freely. It was soon followed on the 4th of August 2016 with the release of blueCFD-Core 2016-1, as new generation for this project.
blueCFD(-Core) was originally developed at blueCAPE in 2009 to bring and share our own cross-compilations of OpenFOAM to the scientific and engineering community, namely those who are bound to Microsoft’s Windows Operating System. We had a need for having OpenFOAM working in Windows and the tutorials for cross-compiling OpenFOAM 1.4.1 and 1.5.0 in Linux for Windows already existed, provided by Symscape.
At the time of the first release of blueCFD, Symscape had already launched their OpenFlow product (which provided their own port), but since our builds are somewhat different, we believed that some competition would also be healthy.
Originally, a similar path was taken to what was done at Symscape, namely to publish the changes to OpenFOAM as public patches, but we instead made them public and fairly detailed at openfoamwiki.net. The entry point for those wiki pages is the following wiki page: Tip Cross Compiling OpenFOAM in Linux For Windows with MinGW
As time passed by, more and more solutions were made available with various degrees of support and price, where a list is maintained on the wiki page Windows at openfoamwiki.net.
In 2015, a decision at blueCAPE was made to expand the already existing public porting effort in blueCFD project at Github to its full extent. This decision came to fruition on August 2016, when it was finally made public.
In February 2017, blueCAPE Lda was institutionally renamed to FSD blueCAPE Lda, after being acquired by FS Dynamics, without affecting the blueCFD-Core project.
In March 2024 this project’s website was updated to refer to FSD blueCAPE as FS Dynamics Portugal (also known as FSD Portugal), given that FSD blueCAPE is an FS Dynamics company.
11th of November 2009: blueCFD 1.6-1 Product/Service Released
17th of August 2010: blueCFD 1.7-1 Product/Service Released
27th of February 2012: blueCFD 2.0-2 and 2.1-1 Product/Service Released
11th of February 2013: blueCFD 2.1-2 Product/Service Released
2nd of April 2014: blueCFD-Core 2.3-1 Product/Service Released
22nd of March 2016: blueCAPE released blueCFD-Core 2.3-1 freely to the public.
4th of August 2016: blueCAPE began the release of the next generation of blueCFD-Core as a publicly free and open source code project, including this website.
Note: The majority of version numbers refer to the respective OpenFOAM version, e.g. blueCFD 1.6 refers to OpenFOAM 1.6.