What is mass imbalance?
 

Hi all,
what is mass imbalance??? The finite volume method is not always conservative????? Is the imbalance due only to round off errors??
Thanks

There was such a topic.. try to search and find it

Hi
in fact i searched a lot and found some topics, but none of it treats this particular question....They all say that FV are conservative wich is not the case of FD, but they never talk about mass imbalance..
Regards

from Fluent user guide

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Hello Ivan,
thank u a lot for ure help.
But i want to know if this imbalance or mass creation is only due to round off errors or not.....
Can this imbalance be cumulative??? so it can be important or always very small????

One more question please:
in the case that this imbalance can be huge, so why Finite volumes is alway prefered to Finite Difference or Finite elements???? All FV users tell because it conserves mass..

Thanks and regards