Yes. OpenFOAM can be used for flow and fluid structure interactions encountered in hemodynamic flow problems.

OpenFOAM and ANSYS Fluent are mainly based on finite-volume method. Whereas, COMSOL is mainly built based on finite-element method.

The notable difference between OpenFOAM and the other two commercial softwares will be the user-interface. OpenFOAM is inherently built on a TUI. Whereas, ANSYS and COMSOL have a very user-friendly GUI.

But, OpenFOAM is very powerfool for research purposes due to its easy customization possibilities.

Meshing using blockMesh of OpenFOAM can be tedious for complex geoemtries. Hence, you have to depend on some third-party meshing applications and snappyHexMesh, etc.

Whereas, ANSYS and COMSOL have better stand-alone meshing capabilities.

OpenFOAM 10 is very well validated for standard fluid dynamic problems. It depends on how complex and involved your problem in medical field is to comment about how easy will it be. If the the problem is straighforward, existing applications within OpenFOAM can be used with little modifications.

Otherwise, you may have to alter their solvers to suit your need. Since it is a freeware, you can first test it out on your problem while having a paid license for any commercial solvers such as COMSOL, ANSYS etc., to validate the results before switching into OpenFOAM. Hope this helps.

There is no doubt that it can be used for medical research.

OpenFoam is definitively a very good solution when dealing with numerical (CFD and FSI) simulations in medical field.

The major differences (in medical field) between Ansys Fluent, Comsol and OpenFoam are as follows (in relation to my experience):

• OpenFoam: it has a very wide user community and it is Open Source, but it is difficult to learn without a proper training program. Moreover, this software prvoides very good scalability on CPU/GPU and you can introduce wheatever you want (e.g., new material classes) if you have some expertise in C++ programming. This is very important ofr medical field: blood usually behaves as non-Newtonian fluid at very high shear rate regimes (similarly to a Carreau fluid, see my paper:

  Article Semi-Analytical Models for Non-Newtonian Fluids in Tapered a...

  for better details on this rheology). Also viscoelastic effects can be embodied in OpenFoam simulations through proper solvers.
• Comsol: very useful when dealing with multiphysics (e.g., coupling laminar flow with heat transfer and other mechanisms). From last versions, viscoelastic flows are available (Polymer Module). About non-Newtonian frheologies, it works very well (in the abovementioned paper I explain how to perform very simple simulations of non-Newtonian fluids). The drawback is that it requires a lot of RAM for 3D simulations and it is not definitely the best solution when it comes to fluid flow simulations
• Fluent: the best choice for fluid flow simulations; it is scalable on multiple CPU/GPU and physics (e.g., flow regimes, heat trasnfer etc.) are very easy to implement. Additional resources can be added through UDFs (user-defined-functions). However, to my knowloedge there is no way to add viscoelastic models, which deeply limits potentialities in medical field

About results: it all depends on your computational domain (mesh size) and applied boundary conditions. A grid-convergence study in CFD should be always mandatory.

Best regards,

AP