[nilsl]

Dear all,

I am looking into implementing multiphysics solvers into OpenFOAM with different physics in different regions. I have tried searching for this with few hits all of which are at least a couple of years old and do not use newer versions of OpenFOAM. My hope is that the forum community could give me an indication what is possible and what is not.

Specifically I want to use OpenFOAM for multi-region problems where some equations are solved in all regions and some are solved only in specific regions. A typical example could be solving different physical equations for solid and fluid regions, while for instance solving electromagnetic equations for all regions.

I have looked into this for version 1606+ and there are multi-region solvers available such as chtMultiRegionFoam, which simulates conjugate heat transfer. As far as I can tell though only explicit coupling is implemented between the different regions. In many cases, this will lead to very slow convergence.

To make multiphysics simulations more efficient in OpenFOAM implicit coupling methods between different regions is likely required. The idea is to solve the equations that apply to all regions using one matrix equation, which would require much fewer iterations. I have seen references to such solution methods but only in version 1.6-ext, which seems quite old. Do you know if there are any similar methods implemented in later versions of OpenFOAM or if there are any plans for implementing something similar?

Best regards,
Nils

[ripudaman]

You can find implicit coupling in region coupled solvers in versions of foam-extend-3.2 and 4.0