I’m total noob here and was hoping I can figure this out, but I soon discovered the learning curve for this stuff is out of my specialties. (I’m more of a Electronics/Linux/Raspi guy) I hoping someone with a bit of spare time could help me get started.
I live in a hot climate (Florida) where temperatures in the attic can easily reach 140F. I want to redirect the ground temperature inlet water (68°F) to the attic to pre-heat the water before going to the hot water tank. Many youtube diy’ers just coil PEX pipe up on the roof for their pool heater… I want to do something like that but more efficient and a bit more ‘calculated’, but it doesn’t have to be super accurate.
Basically, all I want to do in Simscale is have a very long pipe, say 500 ft. Ambient temperature 140F, water flowing through the pipe at 68F (2.5 Gallons/Minute). I would compare simulations for 1/2 inch copper pipe and 1/2" PEX pipe (or similar). My goal is to find the point where the water temperature reaches ambient temperature. That would be the length of pipe I need for my project!
I’m pretty sure once everything is setup, I could play around with the parameters (pipe diameters, temperatures, materials, flow rates, etc) to run my own simulations…
Thanks for the interest in the platform and I hope you get the value out of it. As to your comment:
This seems like a cool application and I think a good option might be to simply cut the tube in 4 symmetrical parts and make use of the symmetry boundary condition. On the inlets you should set the high temperature value and maybe an external wall heat flux to the walls of the tube to observe the water changing in temperature.
I think to get a grasp of each of these concepts (and in the end decide for yourself which conditions to insert in your analysis) a good start might be to follow some of our introductory tutorials. Here are some that might interest you:
