Learning Forum

[Filippo Timperi]

Hello everyone, I am using Ansys Mechanical to perform a thermal analysis. I am looking for a way to extract the view factors for each surface in each enclosure in my model.
Can anyone help me with this?
Thank you very much in advance?

[Chandra Sekaran]

In Mechanical you can use Radiation > Surface-to-surface and indicate the surfaces that will be radiating to each other. This will automatically calculate the view factors during solution and perform the radiation calculations. 

Please refer to https://ansysproducthelpqa.win.ansys.com/account/secured?returnurl=/Views/Secured/corp/v232/en/wb_sim/ds_Radiation.html?q=radiation for further details. During simulation viewfactors are computed for each element face. So, for example, if you have 1000 element faces that form a radiation enclosure you will have a 1000x1000 matrix. To get the average view factor between a source set of radiation faces and target set of radiation faces the VFQUERY APDL command can be used. This is not directly exposed in Mechanical.