Solar Radiation

You can simulate the thermal effects of solar radiation on your model. This workflow enables you to investigate the impact radiation from the sun has on the temperature.

Simulating solar radiation properly requires several additional steps in your simulation.

  1. Enable thermal effects in the fluid physics of the simulation. For more information, see Defining the Fluid Physics of a Flow Simulation.
  2. Enable solar radiation in the fluid physics of the simulation, then choose whether you want to specify the irradiance and sun direction directly or have the app compute it based on the date, time, and location. In addition, set the clustering parameters to control how fine the radiation mesh is. For more information, see Defining Solar Radiation in Fluid Physics.
  3. For transient flow steps, determine the time between the recomputation of the solar loads. For more information, see Defining a Transient Flow Step.
  4. For each wall boundary, specify whether solar radiation participates in the analysis. For participating boundaries, define the absorptivity and transmissivity for each band and define the fraction of solar radiation that is reflected diffusely. For more information, see Defining a Wall.
  5. After you complete the remaining modeling and scenario tasks, you can select the heat flux in each band in your output requests. For more information, see Defining Output Requests.

When the simulation results are available, you can plot contours of the solar heat flux, total heat flux, and the temperature on relevant surfaces. These results can help you locate hot spots in a design and determine how much those hot spots are influenced by the solar radiation.