External Compressible Flow Initial Conditions
 

I am currently running a CFD analysis on a model rocket with external flow. The goal is to determine the effect of fin shapes on the drag, lift, and moment coefficients on the item in steady state conditions.

Currently I am using a modified sonicFoam solver which utilizes the compressible CoNum to determine the time step. This solver works well with the domain initialized to the free-stream conditions, but I would like to set the initial conditions a little closer to the final result as I currently have to start with a very low time step (Co~0.01) in order to avoid crashing at the start up.

I tried using potentialFoam for the initial conditions and this helped a little bit, but I found that it took much longer for the flow to reach steady state than just starting fresh. Any thoughts or suggestions?