CoolFOAM: The CoolProp wrapper for OpenFOAM

Nowadays, the evaluation of the transport and thermodynamic properties in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis is based on common real gas equations (such as Redlich-Kwong and Peng-Robinson equations of state) and polynomial models. Such quantities are not always accurate: very large pressure ranges, working conditions close to the critical point or phase change could introduce an error during the computation of the thermophysical properties of interest. Moreover, the computational effort of numerical simulations is strongly affected by the evaluation of such properties. In light of these considerations, and to extend the modeling capabilities of CFD software suites, a fluid thermophysical property library can be included in the computation of the quantities required for the solution of the flow field. The focus of this work is the coupling of an open source CFD tool (OpenFOAM) with the open source CoolProp library. The proposed wrapper is intended to provide a connection between the most popular open-source thermophysical library and one of the most used open-source CFD software. CoolFOAM extends the thermophysical modeling possibilities of OpenFOAM. The formal implementation of this library follows the coding standards of the CFD suite.