CST2013: Thermal Stationary Solver Overview

The thermal solvers are capable of solving stationary or transient temperature distributions. Depending of the requirements of your model many different thermal aspects may be considered. It is possible not only to simulate problems with solver specific sources, but also to do coupled simulations in combination with other solvers.

Thermal sources

Various thermal sources are available to pose the thermal problem. This also includes external loss distributions which allows to use losses from other CST STUDIO SUITE solvers.

Bioheat

Biological heating/cooling mechanisms (blood perfusion and basal metabolic rate) can be taken into account by activating the appropriate check-box in the thermal specials dialog box.

Surface boundaries (radiation / convection)

Thinking of thermal effects there are different phenomena that need to be taken into account. Beside the thermal conduction the thermal solvers also offers models for thermal radiation and thermal convection through surfaces.

Thermal Boundary Conditions

Thermal boundary conditions can be defined independently  from electromagnetic boundary conditions. To do so, open the boundary dialog box and select the thermal boundary tab.

Mesh Type

The stationary thermal solver supports tetrahedral and hexahedral meshes.

General Hints

Please consider the following general hints on how to increase the performance of your simulation runs.

• Always make use of geometric symmetry planes.

• Avoid an unnecessarily large calculation domain size.

• Avoid huge differences for material parameters - if possible use radiation- or convection boundaries or use PTC material if effects inside good thermal conductors are not of interest.

Result Data Caching

For further processing of single runs within a multi-run (e.g. Parameter Sweep, Optimization) all models and results can be stored in sub-folders on the hard disk when checking the ”Store results in data cache” option.  This might be very helpful for own macros or just to check a single run.

Adaptive Mesh refinement

The tetrahedral based stationary solver offers an adaptive mesh refinement option.

Thermal results

The stationary solver offers a variety of 2D and 3D result types which are described here.