[chriss85]

I have always found it a bit annoying that you need to find the residual tolerances for PIMPLE loops yourself to get the solver to break the loop after convergence, so I have written a solutionControl class that recognizes converged residuals. This is done by checking that the minimum residual didn't drop atleast by a factor of x after y steps. Using this class in a solver makes it possible to break the loop at convergence using nearly a minimum amount of steps without manually finding tolerance levels. This is also beneficial for unsteady cases in which the converged residual values change with time and have to be adjusted. In a case like this, set the absolute residual tolerances to something very low which won't be reached by the solver and residual tolerances to zero so only the new method is used.

For using the class in a solver simply replace the

#include pimpleControl.H

line with

#include smartControl.H

and instantiate the smartControl class instead of the pimpleControl class. You can use nSteps and minResidualDecrease properties in PIMPLE subdictionary in fvSolution.

[wyldckat]

Greetings Chris,

Thanks for sharing. A few suggestions:

1. You can report this on the bug tracker (on both OpenFOAM and foam-extend) as a feature request and provide the files and information you've provided here. Both projects accept code contributions.
2. And/or if the feature request is not accepted, please add an entry on the wiki, for example, here: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Contrib/smartControl

Best regards,
Bruno

[chriss85]

For integrating it into the official OpenFOAM version it would be smarter to insert the code directly into the pimpleControl class, since there is some duplicate code and the current approach requires modifications to the solvers. I went this route to maintain compatibility with future OF versions without modifying their source files. This would not be needed if it was in the official code though.