AbstractWe present a discrete adjoint version of the open-source fluid-dynamics package OpenFOAM obtained by operator overloading which yields, in comparison to continuous adjoint versions, a greater flexibility and robustness. We discuss our implementation and how the discrete adjoint version of OpenFOAM differs from existing continuous implementations. To reduce the inherent memory requirement of discrete adjoint code we introduce a checkpointing scheme to trade computation time for memory. Moreover we show results from a relevant reference case.