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In a structural-thermal simulation, you can choose how to define the conductive heat transfer between contact surfaces. This video explains how you can do that in Discovery 2026R1.

Important considerations:

If contact occurs, a small value of thermal contact conductance yields a measured amount of imperfect contact and a temperature discontinuity across the contact surfaces. A small thermal contact conductance can also be used to represent a thin layer of material with a different conductivity, such as a gasket.

For large values of thermal contact conductance, the resulting temperature discontinuity tends to vanish and perfect thermal contact is approached. With a zero value, however, the solver assumes that no heat is transferred across the contacting surfaces.

Note: While the application can solve with a value of 0, which specifies no electric transfer between the faces, a project with a 0 value for electric conductance is invalid when exported to the Workbench application. You must then replace zero conductance with some small value.

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