A native desktop GUI for setting up, running, and post-processing OpenFOAM® CFD simulations — with no artificial limits and nothing hidden.
FlowDesk wraps the canonical OpenFOAM workflow — Geometry → Mesh → Physics → Boundary Conditions → Numerics → Run → Results — in a single, modern, consistent cockpit. It generates standard, transparent, inspectable OpenFOAM cases; it never locks them away in a proprietary format.
Core philosophy: "Generate, don't hide." Every UI action maps to standard OpenFOAM dictionary entries you can open, read, diff, and version-control. Power users can drop to the files at any time; beginners never have to. FlowDesk is a case compiler with a cockpit, not a black box.
A complete dam-break (free-surface interFoam) walkthrough, stage by stage:
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| Landing — recent projects, environment status, and one-click templates. | Geometry — imported STL with watertight/normals diagnostics and the domain box. |
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Mesh — snappyHexMesh result with a checkMesh traffic-light quality report. |
Physics — the model wizard resolving to interFoam, with the feature summary. |
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| Run — live residuals, write controls, and runtime monitors during a parallel solve. | Results — alpha.water slice with the time-step animation and color-range controls. |
OpenFOAM is the most capable open-source CFD suite in existence, but its native workflow is hostile to working engineers: hand-edited dictionary files with unforgiving syntax, a case directory assembled by convention, a chain of CLI utilities that must run in the right order with the right flags, and error messages written for C++ developers. The existing GUI ecosystem is either expensive, cloud-locked and metered, artificially capped, abandoned, or bolted onto a host CAD application.
FlowDesk is built for the engineer who knows CFD theory but uses OpenFOAM intermittently and shouldn't have to relearn the dictionary syntax every project.
Take a practicing engineer from an STL and basic CFD knowledge to a running, converged case in minutes — without documentation — and produce a case directory a CLI purist would find completely standard and portable.
- No artificial limits. No cell caps, no core caps, no metered hours. Your hardware is the only limit.
- Case transparency. Generated cases are vanilla OpenFOAM (target: OpenFOAM.com v2506) — portable to clusters, ParaView, and colleagues.
- First-class Windows via managed WSL2: detection, guided install, transparent path translation.
- Honest errors. Real OpenFOAM stderr surfaced verbatim, with a plain-language explanation layered on top — never swallowed, never faked.
- Round-trip contract. Hand-edit a generated file and FlowDesk detects it, marks those keys "user-owned", and never silently overwrites your work.
- Step-by-step model wizard — a SimScale-style decision tree (Single Phase / Multiphase / Free Surface / …) that resolves to the right OpenFOAM solver, with a feature-badge summary and a "choose solver manually" bypass.
- Project templates — a gallery of ready-to-run cases (lid-driven cavity, pipe flow, external aero, open channel, flow over a weir, dam break, vortex shedding, scalar mixing), plus save any case as your own reusable template.
- STL/OBJ import with automatic diagnostics (watertight, normals, units sanity).
- Create primitives in-app (box / sphere / cylinder / cone / plane), editable and regenerated on the fly, with per-object visibility toggles.
blockMeshbackground mesh +snappyHexMeshrefinement and snapping, with auto-suggested domain bounds and material point.- Optional surface refinement — snap the geometry without adding refinement for a fast first mesh.
- A
checkMeshtraffic-light quality report and live mesh preview where you can click patches to highlight them in distinct colors.
- Steady (
simpleFoam) and transient (pimpleFoam) single-phase flow; laminar, k-ε and k-ω SST turbulence. - Free-surface multiphase (
interFoam) for dam-break / hydraulics, with a water column initialized viasetFields. - Passive scalar transport for mixing and tracer studies.
- A physical-intent boundary-condition system (velocity/flow-rate/pressure inlets, pressure/total-pressure outlets, walls, slip, symmetry, atmosphere) that generates every field file atomically and consistently — plus per-field overrides for power users. Selecting a patch highlights it in the 3D view.
- Robust / Balanced / Accurate numerics presets, with a first-order-start assist.
- Detached parallel execution: the solver runs decoupled from the GUI, so closing FlowDesk doesn't kill the run — and reopening the project re-attaches to it.
- Live residual plots, Courant/continuity monitoring, graceful stop / kill.
- Smart divergence diagnosis: detects a struggling run from the live signals and offers one-click fixes (apply Robust numerics, lower the Courant number).
- Runtime monitors (function objects): forces & coefficients, flow rate, field min/max/average, point probes.
- In-app slices, surface contours, vector glyphs, and point probes via PyVista.
- Animate through time steps with a play/pause control, loop, and speed; a color-range filter (auto or fixed min/max) keeps colors comparable across frames.
- One-click Open in ParaView for everything beyond the in-app set.
- Managed WSL2 on Windows with guided OpenFOAM install and a
.wslconfighelper. - A collapsible icon rail, consistent resizable panels, a clean two-column landing screen, and a built-in dictionary file browser/editor.
FlowDesk targets OpenFOAM.com v2506 on Linux, or Windows via WSL2. It uses
uv for dependency management.
uv sync # install dependencies (Python 3.13+, PyQt6, PyVista, foamlib)
uv run flowdesk # launch the appOn first launch FlowDesk probes your environment; if OpenFOAM (or WSL2 on Windows) isn't found, a guided setup panel walks you through installing it once.
Developer commands:
uv run pytest # run the test suite
uv run ruff check . # lint
uv run flowdesk-gallery # living style-gallery window (the design system)Strict downward-only layering keeps the model and adapter headless and unit-testable without Qt — which is also the seed of a future scripting API.
| Layer | Package | Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| UI | flowdesk.ui |
PyQt6 widgets, QSS theme, 3D viewer |
| Application | flowdesk.app |
project manager, validation, staleness, templates |
| Case model | flowdesk.model |
typed, serializable, validating — single source of truth |
| OpenFOAM adapter | flowdesk.foam |
model ⇄ dictionaries via foamlib; round-trip engine |
| Execution | flowdesk.exec |
process supervision, pipelines, log parsers, diagnosis |
| Platform | flowdesk.platform |
environment discovery, WSL2 bridge, path translation |
The generated case is plain OpenFOAM plus a single flowdesk.json sidecar inside the
case directory. Delete the sidecar and you have an ordinary OpenFOAM case — by design.
FlowDesk is open source and we'd genuinely love your help. Whether you're a CFD engineer, a Python/Qt developer, or just someone who hit a rough edge — contributions of every size are warmly welcomed and deeply appreciated. 🙏
Ways to help:
- Try it and report what breaks. Bug reports with a case that reproduces the issue are gold.
- Suggest features or share the workflows you wish were faster.
- Add or improve templates, error explanations, BC types, or solvers.
- Improve docs — even fixing a confusing sentence helps the next person.
- Pick up code — the model and adapter layers are headless and fully tested, so they're a friendly place to start.
To get started: fork the repo, uv sync, make your change, run uv run pytest and
uv run ruff check ., and open a pull request. Open an issue first if you'd like to
discuss a larger change. Please be kind and constructive — this is a welcoming project.
If FlowDesk is useful to you, a ⭐ on the repo genuinely helps and means a lot.
FlowDesk is under active development. The core workflow (geometry → mesh → physics → BCs → numerics → run → results) is complete and verified end-to-end against real OpenFOAM v2506, including parallel runs, free-surface dam breaks, and transient vortex shedding. See the commit history for the milestone-by-milestone build.
GPL-3.0-or-later.
OPENFOAM® is a registered trade mark of OpenCFD Limited. This product is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited.