code_saturne User's Forum

Dear Developers,
I have been tracing the code since its release. Code_Saturne is a very interesting code. It is well documented and very capable deomonstrated by the show cases. Thank the developers for their great contributions to CFD community. However, to date, I does not use the code because I cannot read french. some guys may have similar situations as me. I would like put my views here as an open discussion if possible.

Open source is a big decision to the developers. Your efforts will be appreciated by users by acknowedging your dedications of the code, reporting bugs and suggesting further developments to improve the code, advocating the code and etc. On the other hand, As users, we can get trained (for the first class of users) and/or conduct further developments based on an open platform (for the second class of users). Of course, some researchers and engineerings may use the code a tool for works as they may not have money to buy a commercial CFD (or other reasons) (for the third class of users). This is a win-win program. Of course, the developers contributes more if we views this in a relatively short period. If the code is well recognized in the entire CFD community worldwide, the developers should gain a lot.

The first two classes of users may need well documents. In this view, Code_Saturne does very well, or say much better compared to others like OpenFoam. However, the main document related to theory is in French. As the second class of users mentioned above, I have not strarted to use the code. This is because I want to moves my codes related to multiphase flow to Code_Saturne platform. For such purpopse, I need to generally understand the theories behind the code and well know the variables. But Many of them are in French in the code.

I appreciates comments from the developers.

Regards,
Gonski

Hello,

You may be interested in the Doxygen documentation of the Code, at http://code-saturne.org/doxygen/src/index.html, especially the files part (http://code-saturne.org/doxygen/src/files.html), in which Martin has recently added some theory documentation (in English) for some files. This should progressively replace the current French file by file theory chapters in the current manual. Also, the theory manual is currently being partly re-written, in English.

The next release of the code version 2.3, (early July 2012) should focus more on improvements to the code than documentation, but version 3.0 (January 2013) will be a "long term support" version (as is 2.0), and features will be mostly frozen early fall for extensive validation, with a good deal of work on the documentation, so most of the theory documentation should be in English by January 2013.

In the meantime, the following article: http://code-saturne.org/cms/content/Cod ... ible-Flows should provide most of the required information, so you may search for it.

Regarding the code itself, comments are progressively translated (when modifying neighboring code), but this is a very long process. Most variable names are relatively standardized, though, and have English descriptions comments.

Best regards,

Yvan