[pbevington]

Hi all, I'm relatively new to OpenFoam and was trying to understand reactingFoam when I came across this point of confusion about the pure virtual methods correct() and Qdot():

In reactingFoam (YEqn.h), we use the pointer reaction to call virtual methods belonging to the combustion model class:

reaction->correct();
Qdot = reaction->Qdot();

For reference, the pointer is defined in createFields.H:

autoPtr<CombustionModel<psiReactionThermo>> reaction
(
    CombustionModel<psiReactionThermo>::New(thermo, turbulence())
);

CombustionModel inherits these virtual methods from combustionModel.h:

        //- Correct combustion rate
        virtual void correct() = 0;

        //- Fuel consumption rate matrix, i.e. source term for fuel equation
        virtual tmp<fvScalarMatrix> R(volScalarField& Y) const = 0;

        //- Heat release rate [kg/m/s3]
        virtual tmp<volScalarField> Qdot() const = 0;

My question is: where are these pure virtual methods being implemented in the code? They aren't defined in CombustionModel.c, and digging around I couldn't find any evidence of their implementation that would affect reactingFoam, which leads me to be confused about how they would work at all...

[pbevington]

I think I figured this out- CombustionModel.c doesn't implement the virtual methods because it is only creating a pointer to a specific combustion model type (EDM, laminar, infinitelyFastChemistry, etc) defined by the user at runtime. Instead, the virtual methods are implemented in these individual models, as they differ between them.