TURBULENT VISCOSITY LIMITED

There are lots of things that could cause high turbulent viscosity. The two most common
reasons are that it's a meshing problem, or that it's not a big deal. If it's early in your
solution, and the number of cells decreases to zero, then you probably don't have a
problem.

If it doesn't seem to be dropping, then its probably a meshing problem and you need to go
into your model and find where the problem is. Do Plot->Contours, choose the default-
interior, or whatever you've called your volume, turn off node values, and turn off auto
range. Plot a range of about 1e3 to 1e5, and make sure clip to range is on. Also, make sure
plot grid is on, so you know where in the model you're looking at. You can play around with
the lower end of the range to nail down exactly where the problem is. Once you know where
the problem is, you probably need to re-evaluate your mesh in this region (typically you
want a finer mesh in this area if this is the problem).

There are other things involved with this error, but those are the two most common. There
has been a lot of discussion on this error in the past, and if what I said above doesn't help,
then I recommend searching the forum. There's a lot of good information in there, and I
couldn't possibly re-type it all, or even remember it all.

Hope this helps, and good luck, Jason

well this is one common problem lot of people have asked about it before. i will try to
summarize the approach i take to solve this problem.

first of all, the very basic cause of this warning is the wrong set up of boundary conditions.
So if you are sure that nothing is wrong with the set up of the problem, you can follow the
following things.

The origin of the problem lies in the fact that if the solver calculates the value of k and e or
omega (in two equation models) wrongly, its very likely it will calculate turbulent viscosity
wrongly and thus we get the warning. In the ideal condition, as the solution converges the
warning should go away and we all live happily ever after. But generally this does not have
so happy ending. The reason is mainly we have a case which is very large and convergence is
already difficult and which is exacerbated by the wrong calculations of turbulent quantities.
So what are the remedies for it.

The usual remedy is to switch to coupled solver, and work with it, and this usually solves the
problem. But my personal thinking is that if the case is incompressible the coupled solver
may not work well there. But yes this is one solution. The second solution which is far more
stable is, and if you fail to get the solution from coupled solver too, switch to FAS, increase
the number of pre post iterations, make the coarsening levels to 4, (4 is more than enough).
And this converges almost every problem, but there are case where you might fail to get
convergence.
Anyway if you are stuck with segregated solver (like me), what are the options.

First of all if we consider that the divergence is because of turbulence quantities, we may
want to force the convergence on these quantities before we move to next iteration.

The way I do is this, I change the multigrid options for k, e to V cycle, make the pres sweeps
to 1 post sweeps to 2, and chose Bicgstab as smoother. And let it run.

Sometimes I just want to first get the best approaximation of k,e for the flow field I have, for
this I usually switch off the solver for momentum equations and just solve for k,e or k,
omega till I get warning free turbulent field, then I switch on all the equations and go on to
iterate further.

This approach works well, but it has one problem. if the mesh size is very large say around 3
million cells then even to first get the turbulent quantities to converge might take day or
two. So what to do in this case.

Whenever I have to do calculations for the cases around 2-3 million cells, I make two meshes
one very very coarse, with same boundary conditions as finer mesh (which is of course
around 3 million cells). Now first I get converged solution on coarse mesh, which I can get in
hour or two. Then go to file->interpolate, and write the data for corresponding zones, and
then when you read the fine mesh read this initial guess from same file->interpolate->read.

And here switch off the momentum calculations do some calculations only for turbulent
quantites, (if u get viscocity warning, it will soon go away, though I never got warning here
since the solution is already converged), so after say 3-4 calculations switch on solver for all
the quantities and go on to iterate, you will get converged solution.

(well on coarse grid you can use FAS to force convergence, its quite handy there).

Hope this will be useful.