Hello, I made a transient thermal analysis where i set up the "initial temperature", the "convection" and the "heat power". I would like to know if the conduction is automatically gerenate ? For the natural air convection, i used a value between 5-25 as i saw in the solidworks' table. Is it possible to be more accurate ? And i would also like to know in which cases i can ignore the radiation parameter ? Thanks
Hi Louis,
For a thermal analysis conduction is calculated as a perfect zero resistance interface by default for all bodies in contact with each other. That remains in effect unless you define specific contact resistance boundary definitions.
Regarding whether it is possible to be more accurate with your use of convection on faces the answer is "ehhhhh, sorta." The answer to a small degree is "yes" in that you can apply discrete convection values for each face of the model. Each type of face (top, vertical side, bottom) will generally have different ranges for convection constant. In practice the amount of work that goes into discretizing the convection boundary per face is lost in the inaccuracy inherent to convection constant value ranges that have to then be calculated for each face based off its specific geometry. So, yes you can, it just has a poor ROI on time invested.
If you are looking to have more accurate convection values on a model then you would be looking at moving into a Flow Simulation as the convection values are non-constant and calculated based on the actual fluid flow parameters happening around the model.