  The selective frequency damping (SFD) method is an alternative to classical
Newton's method to obtain unstable steady-state solutions of dynamical systems.
However this method has two main limitations: it does not converge for
arbitrary control parameters; and when it does converge, the time necessary to
reach the steady-state solution may be very long. In this paper we present an
adaptive algorithm to address these two issues. We show that by evaluating the
dominant eigenvalue of a "partially converged" steady flow, we can select a
control coefficient and a filter width that ensure an optimum convergence of
the SFD method. We apply this adaptive method to several classical test cases
of computational fluid dynamics and we show that a steady-state solution can be
obtained without any a priori knowledge of the flow stability properties.
