u/New-Pay1536

Hey, I’m working on a small local tool for CFD folders. In a previous project, the shared drive gradually filled up with copied and renamed cases, different meshes, logs and results. After a while, it was hard to tell which case was used, what changed, or why one version was kept.

The idea is simple: point the tool at an existing folder, and it scans everything without modifying the files. It builds a small local database so the cases and their context can be viewed together.

At the moment, you can:

Browse the openfoam cases it found.
See basic solver, mesh, boundary, numerical and run information.
Select two cases and see what changed.
Group cases that belong to the same experiment or investigation.
Add labels and short notes, such as why a case was kept or abandoned.

I’m currently testing OpenFOAM Foundation 9, Foundation 14 and OpenCFD v2512. I may look at Fluent later (pyfluent), and possibly add some simple orchestration (run sims or like mesh, etc).

I attached screenshots of the case list and group view. It’s still very early, though. I am trying to make it like an additional "why? where? and how?" tracker kinda thing.

At my last company, our CFD “workspace” was basically one big shared drive.

Everyone had their own folder. If I needed someone else's case, I'd ask where it was, copy it into mine, rename it, make my changes and keep going. After enough variants, it became pretty hard to answer basic questions like which CAD/mesh produced a result, what exactly changed between two runs, or why we stopped using one version.

Maybe that was just us.

I'm working on a small CFD workspace around this problem. The idea is to keep the geometry/computational domain, mesh, setup, runs, plots and the reason for changes connected instead of treating every simulation as another folder.

I don't know yet whether this should sit above things like OpenFOAM/Fluent, integrate deeply with one solver, or whether the whole idea is unnecessary because most teams already have a decent system.

So I'm curious about something specific.

If someone asked you today to reproduce an old run and explain exactly what changed from the previous one, how would you do it?

What are you actually using right now?

I am writing this tool to organise / explain a CFD workspace (at least trying to)

I’m building a CFD workspace because our shared drive was a mess. Is this actually a problem?