Need help with modeling, assembling, and thermal simulation

Sean,

You should ask your thermal analysis questions in the SolidWorks Simulation/Simulation forum.

Your wire has a certain resistivity, resistance per unit length. For a given current, I, that translates into a voltage drop per unit length, V. The power dissipated per unit length is equal to the current times the voltage drop, I x V. You should be able to put that in as a power input to your wire body in the simulation.

Jerry S.

Haven't looked at your model but a couple things.

For the heat input, a temp or a power is most traditional. If you care about the loss over the length, you'll need to split the body into multiple prices and apply lower and lower heat along the part. In flow simulation you could model this directly with joule heating. You would need the ec module.

Regarding the environment, sim thermal does t know anything about the environment. All faces not touching or with no boundary condition need to have a convection coefficient applied to them to simulate an environment. In flow this isn't the case. You just input the environment.

Regarding your model. If you can't find a mating solution. I would recommend building a model for analysis that meets your needs. I use a lot of multibody parts for this. Tangent mates may be helpful to you. You can also use the cavity feature to trim parts with other parts to rove interferences.