Abstract:

This work reports the success of the open source code SPHysics that has been very welcome by researchers and students of different universities worldwide. The source code can be freely downloaded from the website www.sphysics.org. This free software was developed and redistributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

SPHysics is a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) numerical model developed to study free-surface flows. It is the product of a collaborative effort amongst researchers at the Johns Hopkins University (US), the University of Vigo (Spain) and the University of Manchester (UK). The first version of SPHysics was released on August 2007. A new version of the code named DualSPHysics has also been released as open source at www.dual.sphysics.org. The new code can be applied to real engineering problems. Due to the lagrangian nature of the method, the code allows the student to understand complex problems in Fluid Dynamics by following particle trayectories.

One of the strengths of the codes is the careful documentation, where all the source files are properly documented, not only using platforms such as Doxygen (www.doxygen.org) but also with a user guide. In fact, this user guide describes how to compile and run the codes and describes several working examples to enable the user to use the codes and understand how they work.

These open source codes have been downloaded not only by students and researchers from universities and institutes but also by companies. More than 25,000 downloads have been registered, most of them by researchers and students that have conducted his PhD on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) using SPH models thanks to the SPHysics project. On the other hand, several practical hands-on sessions of conferences and courses on fluid dynamics and meshless methods have been conducted using these open source codes.

Keywords:

Open source, e-content, code documentation.