Hi there
I’m a high school student working on a Physics project, and need some help setting a system up for simulation runs. I want to analyse the change in temperature for a transient thermal system. The system I want to design is a cylindrical container closed from the bottom, surrounded by a layer of insulation, and filled with water. I want to measure the final temperature of the water after 5 minutes for different thicknesses of insulation. Can anyone give me some input on how I can achieve this?
Hi @shehadehabood5, thanks for posting on the forum and welcome to the SimScale Community 
You could monitor the temperature change by using three possible solvers:
- Convective Heat Transfer | Analysis Types | SimScale (no solid-fluid thermal interactions)
- Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis v2.0 | Analysis Types | SimScale (you can setup solid and fluid thermal interactions)
- Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis (IBM) | Analysis Types | SimScale (same as the previous one, but uses a cartesian mesh)
Make sure to also check out some tutorials to make a quick start to the platform, specially these ones:
Keep in mind that transient analysis - required to observe changes in temperature through time - usually consumes lots of resources computationally speaking and if you’re just trying to observe the impact of the insulation, maybe a steady-state analysis would suffice.
Best,
Igor
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Hi, if you know the properties of the insulator (thermal conductivity), if the temperature difference between the inside and the ambient is small (e.g., 30°C), and if it is a good insulator (with a very low convective heat transfer coefficient - working with natural convection), it is much more cost-efficient to perform a mass and energy balance in Python or MATLAB.
Accurately capturing such phenomena in CFD requires many time steps due to the small amount of heat leaving the vessel and a fine-enough mesh to capture the thermal boundary layer (even using wall functions).