The Heat Transfer in Shells (htlsh) interface (
), found in the
Thin Structures physics area under the
Heat Transfer branch (
), is used to model heat transfer by conduction, convection and radiation in layered materials represented by boundaries. The interface is active on all boundaries where a layered material is defined, with a
Solid model active by default. All functionalities for including other boundary contributions, such as surface-to-ambient radiation, are also available.
Although the layered material is represented as a boundary in the model, the through-thickness variation of the temperature is accounted for. It means that the temperature equation corresponding to the Fourier’s law (see Equation 4-52) is solved also in the layered material’s thickness direction. In addition, a single boundary may represent several layers with different thermal properties varying through the thickness of the layered material. This uses the Extra Dimension tool which defines the equations on the product space between the boundary and the additional dimension for the thickness of the layered material. See
Modeling Layered Materials for details.
For thermally thin boundaries, it is possible to bypass the use of the product space, by selecting Nonlayered shell in the
Shell type list, and setting a user defined value for the
Thickness Lth directly in the interface. A lumped formulation assuming that heat transfer mainly follows the tangential direction of the boundary is then available.
When this version of the physics interface is added, these default nodes are also added to the Model Builder:
Solid,
Thermal Insulation (an edge condition), and
Initial Values. Then, from the
Physics toolbar, add additional nodes that implement, for example, boundary interface or edge conditions, and heat sources. You can also right-click
Heat Transfer in Shells to select physics features from the context menu.
See Boundary Selection for a description this section, common to all versions of the Heat Transfer in Shells interface.
See Shell Properties for a description this section, common to all versions of the Heat Transfer in Shells interface.
By default, the Heat transfer in porous media check box is not selected. Select it to make the
Porous Medium boundary feature available, for the modeling of fractures.
By default, the shape functions used for the temperature are Quadratic Lagrange. This setting affects also the discretization of the temperature field in the thickness direction.