solar heat flux through roof
 

I would like to determine how much heat flux will be added to a domain by a solar load only. I have set up simple roof sections in the following ways:

1. Using a zero-thickness wall with Shell Conduction and a supplied thickness, etc.

2. Meshing the actual solid components and assigning the material properties to it.

I am trying to use the solar ray tracing algorithm and am having a hard time figuring out exactly how to set it up.

What surfaces do I pick to participate in solar ray tracing? Only the roof? Everything? The roof and the inlets/outlets?

What post processing value should I use to get the heat flux that will be passed through the roof section. Do I look at "Total Surface Heat Flux" in the "Wall Fluxes" panel? Or is there another value to look at?

I am new to solar calculations and would also like some tips on what one would typically expect for a heat flux with a solar heat flux of 1120 W/m^2 applied to the outside of a roof?

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Re: solar heat flux through roof
 

After working with FLUENT, I figured out the problem. If you are going to use a zero-thickness wall with Shell Conduction in FLUENT 6.3.26, you need to use tri/tet cells instead of quad/hex cells.