Pseudo Time Stepping for Laminar Flow Models
A stationary formulation has per definition no time derivatives and Equation 3-12 reduces to:
(3-47)
Solving Equation 3-47 requires a starting guess that is close enough to the final solution. If no such guess is at hand, the fully transient problem can be solved instead. This is, however, a rather costly approach in terms of computational time. An intermediate approach is to add a fictitious time derivative to Equation 3-47:
where is a pseudo time step. Since unojac(u) is always zero, this term does not affect the final solution. It does, however, affect the discrete equation system and effectively transforms a nonlinear iteration into a step of size of a time-dependent solver.
Pseudo time stepping is not active per default. The pseudo time step can be chosen individually for each element based on the local CFL number:
where h is the mesh cell size. A small CFL number means a small time step. It is practical to start with a small CFL number and gradually increase it as the solution approaches steady state.
If the automatic expression for CFLloc is set to the built-in variable CFLCMP, then the automatic setting suggests a PID regulator for the pseudo time step in the default solver. The PID regulator starts with a small CFL number and increases CFLloc as the solution comes closer to convergence.
The default manual expression is
(3-48)
The variable niterCMP is the nonlinear iteration number. It is equal to one for the first nonlinear iteration. CFLloc starts at 1.3 and increases by 30% each iteration until it reaches 1.39  ≈10.6. It remains there until iteration number 20 at which it starts to increase until it reaches approximately 106. A final increase after iteration number 40 then takes it to 1060. Equation 3-48 can, for some advanced flows, increase CFLloc too slowly or too quickly. CFLloc can then be tuned for the specific application.