Comparison of the Performance of Open-Source and Commercial CFD Packages for Simulating Supersonic Compressible Jet Flows

The objective of this work is to compare the performance efficiency and accuracy of commercial STAR-CCM+ and open-source OpenFOAM computational fluid dynamics codes in simulating compressible supersonic jet flows. For this purpose two cases were considered. The first case is the well-known Ladenburg supersonic jet with Mach reflection and the second case represents gas flow in an automotive airbag. The results showed that computational cost per one iteration for OpenFOAM is comparable or even less than for STAR-CCM+. The accuracy of both codes is also at a comparable level. However, STAR-CCM+ allows making calculation with a larger time step (Co >1), highlighting ways for future OpenFOAM development.