Category: News

2020/03/13 | LBM Spring School with OpenLB Software Lab successfully finished. The executive committee announces the closing of the third LBM Spring School with OpenLB Software Lab. We were happy to host 60 participants from nine countries, including five invited speakers in Berlin, Germany. This year’s poster award goes to Dominik Wilde et al. from the University of Siegen, Germany.

Next year, the 5^th spring school (https://www.openlb.net/spring-school-2021/) in planned to take place at the University of Greenwich in England/UK form 2021 May 31^st to June 4^th.  

On behalf of the spring school executive committee, Nicolas Hafen, Mathias J. Krause, Harald Kruggel-Emden, Christopher McHardy, Cornelia Rauh, Holger Stark, Robin Trunk

Early bird registration is open until the 10th of February 2020 for the Fourth Spring School on Lattice Boltzmann Methods with OpenLB Software Lab. It is held in Berlin, Germany, from 9th to 13th of March 2020. 

On behalf of the spring school executive committee, Nicolas Hafen, Mathias J. Krause, Harald Kruggel-Emden, Christopher McHardy, Cornelia Rauh, Holger Stark, Robin Trunk

2019/12/11 | LBM Workshop with OpenLB Software Lab in Brazil Successfully Finished. The executive committee announces the closing of the LBM Workshop with OpenLB Software Lab at UFRGS in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We were happy to host 35 participants including five speakers from LBRG (KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany).

The workshop took place in the framework of the Brazilian-German PROBRAL project “Mesoscopic Molecular Dynamics Simulations: Development of Models and Computational Strategies for Complex Structural Bioinformatics Problems” supported by CAPES and DAAD.

On behalf of the workshop executive committee, Marcio Dorn, Mathias J. Krause, Stephan Simonis.

Registration is now open for the Fourth Spring School on Lattice Boltzmann Methods with OpenLB Software Lab that will be held in Berlin, Germany, from 9^th to 13^th of March 2020. The spring school introduces scientists and applicants from industry to the theory of LBM and trains them on practical problems. The first half of the week is dedicated to the theoretical fundamentals of LBM up to ongoing research on selected topics. Followed by mentored training on case studies using OpenLB in the second half, where the participants gain deep insights into LBM and its applications. This educational concept offers a comprehensive and personal guided approach to LBM. Participants also benefit from the knowledge exchange during the poster session, coffee breaks, and the excursion. We look forward to your participation.

Keep in mind that the number of participants is limited and that the registration follows a first come first serve principle.

On behalf of the spring school executive committee, Nicolas Hafen, Mathias J. Krause, Harald Kruggel-Emden, Christopher McHardy, Cornelia Rauh, Holger Stark, Robin Trunk 

Release 1.3.1 is now available for download. This Release includes some minor bug fixes:

• compilation precompiled mode for HLBM
• output (particle/bifurcation3d/eulerEuler example)
• heat map line endings, multiple core execution (laminar/cylinder2d example)

We have just released a new Video on our OpenLB YouTube Channel. The Video shows the simulation of a nebulizer which is used to deliver small droplets of medical drugs through the patients lungs.

For further information we created a new show case dealing with this topic: Nebulizer Simulation

The simulation was performed by Mathias J Krause using OpenLB
(www.openlb.net). The Video was created by Alexandra Kerl.

If you have a nice video which you have obtained with OpenLB, please let us know and we will link it or upload it. Please contact us.

Release 1.3 Available. The OpenLB developer team is very happy to announce that a new release of the open source Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) code is available for download as well as a new doxygen documentation. Have a look and be excited!

The new features and interfaces are:

• New user-friendly features:
  • New meta descriptor concept
  • New homogenised lattice Boltzmann method
  • New free energy model
  • Validated wall shear stress functor
• New examples:
  • multiComponent/contactAngle2d and multiComponent/contactAngle3d
  • multiComponent/youngLaplace2d and multiComponent/youngLaplace3d
  • multiComponent/microFluidics2d
  • particles/magneticParticles3d
  • particles/settlingCube3d
  • particles/dkt2d
  • porousMedia/porousPoiseuille3d
• Minor improvements and developer notes:
  • Restructure example folder
  • Restructure and improve functors
  • New std::shared_ptr-based functor arithmetic to ease memory management and enable functor composition
  • Convenient relative and absolute Lp error norm functors
  • Bug fixed in GnuPlotWriter
  • C++ 14 standard is now mandatory
• Compatibility tested on:
  • OSX: 
    • macOS Mojave (10.14.4): clang-1001.0.46.4
  • Windows 10: 
    • Debian WSL: GCC 6.3.0
  • Linux: 
    • Intel 18.0.3, 19.0.0
    • GCC 5.4.0, 6.5.0, 7.3.0, 8.2.0
    • Clang 5.0.2

OpenMPI 1.8 and higher, Intel MPI 5.0 and higher

PS: Please consider joining the developer team, by contributing your code and strengthen the LB community by sharing your research in an open and reproducible way! Feel free to contact us here: Contact

How to constantly clean paint from iron particles?

In the painting lines in the automotive industry, iron particles that reside in paint of a previous production step like tiny welding beads can lead to optical errors in the lacquering of cars. To prevent problems caused by these inclusions, magnetic separators are used to continuously remove the metallic particles from the liquid paint.

Inside the magnetic separator, a static magnetic field is generated by permanent magnets. The magnetic forces attract the metallic particles towards the inner cylinder wall while the remaining liquid flows through and finally leaves the separator.

Here you can find more Information about Magnetic Separation.

Simulation with OpenLB (www.openlb.net) and Visualisation by Daniel Krug and Marie-Luise Maier

If you have a nice video which you have obtained with OpenLB, please let us know and we will link it or upload it. Please contact us.

by Mathias J Krause, Andrew JC King, Nima Nadim, Maciej Cytowski, Shiv Meka, Ryan Mead-Hunter, Hermann Nirschl, Benjamin J Mullins

In a joint project of the Lattice Boltzmann Research Group (LBRG) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Fluid Dynamics Research Group (FDRG) of the Curtin Institute for Computation (CIC, Curtin University), OpenLB was tested, profiled and improved on the Pawsey Magnus super computer (TOP500 at 358 Nov. 2018) and then applied to large scale fliter simulations. This represents one of the largest scale CFD simulations in the world.

The performance of OpenLB was evaluated for a realistic scenarios at the Magnus super computer (TOP500 at 358 Nov. 2018) using up to 32,784 of the available 35,712 cores obtaining 142,479 MLUPs. That are about 142 billion fluid cells which were updated in one second using OpenLB on Magnus. This proves the computational efficiency and scalability of OpenLB, which will allow it to solve some of the largest and most important fluid flow problems relevant to process engineering and a range of other fields.

We just published our new project page for OpenLB. You can find it at https://openlb.net We have added a lot of features to improve the usability of our webpage. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to find the necessary resources.

Improvements include

• A completely new and improved design
• New information packed frontpage
• completely new Forum section (Don’t worry. All your old posts have been moved to the new forum and you can still use your existing username and password.)
• The navigation menu on the left-hand side is now faster than ever
• Completely reworked news section
• Optimization for mobile devices

Please feel free to message us here if you encounter any bugs or problems on the new website.