About Thermal Effects and Radiation in Fluid and Solid Physics

You can enable thermal effects for the simulation and, when thermal effects are active, you can also include radiation effects in the simulation as well. Both options are available for fluid and solid physics.

This page discusses:

See Also
Defining the Fluid Physics of a Flow Simulation
About Physics in a Flow Simulation

Thermal Effects

When thermal effects are enabled, the solver uses a temperature-based energy equation, indicating a thermal (heat) transport simulation with temperature as the primary transport scalar variable. When thermal effects are disabled, no energy equation is used, producing an isothermal flow simulation.

The energy transport equation applies to non-isothermal flows, with coupling between the momentum and energy equations. In turbulent flows, the energy transport includes a turbulent heat flux based on the turbulent eddy viscosity and turbulent Prandtl number.

Radiation

You may select the surface-to-surface radiation model to include radiation effects in your heat transfer simulation. This option becomes available only when you enable thermal effects. The surface-to-surface radiation model considers radiation heat transfer in an diffuse-gray enclosure. You should provide the ambient temperature for any partial enclosure in the simulation. This model also requires the computation of view factors, which characterize the proportion of radiation interchange among surfaces. To adjust settings for view factor calculation, please edit the Surface Radiation Settings feature that has been automatically generated.