Solvers for Turbulent Flow
The nonlinear system that the Navier–Stokes (RANS) and turbulence transport equations constitute can become ill-conditioned if solved using a fully coupled solver. Turbulent flows are therefore solved using a segregated approach (
Ref. 21
): Navier–Stokes in one group and the turbulence transport equations in another.
For each iteration in the Navier–Stokes group in stationary simulations, three iterations are performed for the turbulence transport equations. This is necessary to make sure that the very nonlinear source terms in the turbulence transport equations are in balance before performing another iteration for the Navier–Stokes group.
The default iterative solver for the turbulence transport equations is a damped Newton method with constant damping factor. In each iteration, a linearized version of the nonlinear system is solved using GMRES accelerated by Smoothed Aggregated Algebraic Multigrid (SAAMG). The default smoother is SOR Line.
As the name implies, SAAMG builds its coarser meshes algebraically, so the application requires no additional meshes in order to employ SAAMG. In contrast, Geometric Multigrid (GMG) requires actual meshes. If a sufficient number of multigrid levels can be constructed, GMG is often faster than SAAMG. GMG is also superior for cluster computations and for shared memory computations with many cores.
•
Pseudo Time Stepping for Turbulent Flow Models
•
Multigrid
,
Stationary Solver
,
Iterative
, and
SOR Line
in the
COMSOL Multiphysics Reference Manual
