Discussion Forum

Hi all,

I am interested in transient pseudo 2D (or 1+1D) modeling of a process. In this type of model the only coupling between the two directions comes from the boundary conditions.

As an example, consider heat conduction in a plate that is cooled by air flow on the two sides. Instead of solving the 2D problem, I want to discretize the plate in the y direction. At each discretization point I will solve a 1D heat conduction problem and obtain the amount of heat released to the air flow. Doing this, I will update the air temperature for the next discretization point in the y direction and solve the 1D heat conduction problem using this updated temperature value for the boundary condition. This process is repeated for all discretization points in the y direction.

One possibility is to use MATLAB and at each time step run the model with different boundary conditions. The difficulty that I am facing with that is updating the initial conditions for each time step. I have to fit a function for each distributed variable to define the initial conditions at each time step. This process essentially eliminates the computational benefits of the spatial decoupling and even makes the model slower than a 2D model.

So, I was wondering if there is any way to do this in COMSOL using extrusion operations.

Any help will be appreciated.