Viability of OpenFOAM as the Numerical Engine for Augmented Reality Sandbox

Many augmented reality sandboxes use a single purpose implementation of standard numerical schemes to solve the Saint-Venant equations for shallow water in real time. This work evaluates the open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package OpenFOAM as an alternative to the custom implementations traditionally used. Many sandboxes are used in educational and research settings and CFD engines with costly licensing was not desirable. The goal of this work is to identify or create an OpenFOAM solver that handles features such as dry conditions and complex topographies. The existing shallowWaterFoam solver was identified as the best candidate but required modification to handle scenarios representative of the target application. Replacing the existing custom numerical algorithm with the OpenFOAM software will more easily allow future incorporation additional phenomena.