Learning Forum

[mc77]

Hi! I have some questions about setting up the boundary conditions for steady state thermal analysis. I am modeling a copper cylinder at 250 C radiating to a heat flux gauge (which I model as a small stainless steel disk).

Can I define two boundary conditions on one surface?

Should I define temperature across the entire cylinder and then have it also radiating surface to surface with the disk, or should I only define temperature on the top half of the cylinder?

On the top half, can I have convection, radiation and temperature as conditions?

Finally, I am a little bit confused by the different outputs I can get from a solution. What is the difference between total heat flux and directional heat flux? And how do these differ from the results I get with a radiation probe on either surface?

Thanks for the help :-)

[Chandra Sekaran]

You can apply different boundary conditions on the same surface like temperature, convection and radiation.
Directional heat flux is based on the rate of change of temperature in a particular direction such as X, Y or Z. Total heat flux is the vector sum.
The radiation probe gives you the incident heat and amount of heat leaving the surface (emitted,reflected).

[David Mercier]

To help you to understand such phenomena, you have access to different innovation courses:
And soon a webinar about this topic with Ansys Discovery: https://www.ansys.com/events/cto-bu-next-generation-of-heat-transfer-teaching
Cheers