Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Non-Newtonian Flow using OpenFOAM

•OpenFOAM predictions for turbulent Newtonian fluids match very well with DNS references for mean turbulence statistics.•OpenFOAM predicts turbulent shear-thinning flow to be more transitional compared to a high-order spectral element DNS code.•Turbulence statistics predicted by OpenFOAM differ by at most 16% for shear-thinning fluids, and usually be less than 10%.•OpenFOAM scales well from 8 to 512 CPUs but has poor intranode scalability for less than 8CPUs.