Discussion Forum

Hello,

I'm relatively new to COMSOL. I'm looking to model heat transfer for a cube satellite that is wrapped in Multilayer Insulation (MLI) and exposed to incident solar radiation. MLI consists of alternating layers of very thin (<0.5mm) reflective material that has a low emissivity and low absorptivity, and is primarily intended to reduce radiation heat transfer losses. The MLI I'm trying to model consists of 10 layers of aluminised Mylar with each layer seperated by a layer of PET. I have modelled the material using a layer material link. While I can model conductive heat transfer through the layers using the heat transfer in shells interface, I cannot figure out how to model surface-to-surface radiation between the layers without explicitly representing the layers in the geometry (which will likely cause meshing issues). When looking through the 4.3 release notes I noticed that a surface-to-surface radiation feature seemed to exist for the thin shells interface. Is this available in version 6.0? If not, how can I approach this problem? I would really appreciate any suggestions. Thank you in advance !!