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Adding Conduction with Air Removes Convection (Heat Flux)
Posted Jul 2, 2014, 1:04 p.m. EDT Heat Transfer & Phase Change, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Geometry, Materials, Modeling Tools & Definitions, Parameters, Variables, & Functions Version 4.4 1 Reply
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I am trying to model a solar cell being heated. In a basic sense, this is just a solid being heated by a boundary heat source. This model needs to include Surface-to-ambient radiation, the boundary heat source on the solid itself, conduction to the air surrounding the solid, and convection with the air surrounding the solid. So basically what I have is just a block with these boundary conditions.
Here's the problem: If I have just the solid as the only geometric entity in the model, I can have the boundary heat source, surface-to-ambient radiation, and heat flux (convection). What's missing, however, is conduction to the surrounding air. So, what I did is I added a very big block of air surrounding the solid block. This takes care of the conduction, however, when I do this, the Heat Flux/convection boundary conditions on my solid block are all "not applicable"/overridden. This of course make my model inaccurate.
In short: How can I include both Heat Flux/convection, and conduction in this model?
Note: I only have COMSOL multiphysics and do not yet have the Heat Transfer Module.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Best,
Nick
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On the other side when you add an air block enclosing the entire model you should add the physics conjugated heat transfer to consider the convection.