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
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).