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Relaxation and Convergence Criteria
Numerical methods used to solve the equations for fluid flow and heat transfer most often employ one or more iteration procedures. By their nature, iterative solution methods require a convergence criteria that is used to decide when the iterations can be terminated.
In many cases, iteration methods are supplemented with relaxation techniques. For example, over-relaxation is often used to accelerate the convergence of pressure-velocity iteration methods, which are needed to satisfy an incompressible flow condition. Under-relaxation is sometimes used to achieve numerically stable results when all the flow equations are implicitly coupled together.