Heat Conduction

The Heat Transfer interface in this module provides tools for analyzing heat transfer that is proportional to a temperature gradient, or conduction. It accounts explicitly for the geotherm as a heat source. This physics interface provides options to calculate thermal properties for multicomponent media. It incorporates boundary and source options to represent transversal fluxes such as convection and radiation at adjacent domains that you do not explicitly model.

The physics interface describes heat flow with negligible impacts of moving fluids. Just a few targets for conduction modeling include resistive heating in cores, estimating a surface heat flux, describing a temperature profile with depth, phase changes, exothermic reactions, and cooling earth analyses. The physics interface provides tools to consider radiative and convection heat transfers at boundaries so that you can focus on the physics in the domain of interest. With the COMSOL Multiphysics “just-type-it-in” modeling flexibility, it is straightforward to create nonlinear expressions where, for example, thermal conductivity varies with temperature as well as other physics.

Heat conduction figures into radiogenic decay, pressure-temperature phase changes, cooling-earth models, radiation, exothermic and endothermic reactions of solutes, microbial processes, diurnal heating, and many other earth processes. Conductive heat transfer can be long-term steady or exquisitely sensitive over tiny time increments. It can involve molten materials, mineral grains, fluids trapped within interstices, human-made structures, and molten rock. The heat conduction can operate within closed systems, but the geometry of interest often interacts at edges and surfaces with adjacent domains through moving fluids, conduction across a semi-insulating layer, and radiation. The models can cover such large distances that the tiny amount of heat given off by the spontaneous decay of the radiogenic particles present in most rocks produces the discernible temperature gradient with depth known to many as the geotherm.