Internal Flow with Heat Transfer
 

I have never used OpenFoam for internal flow or heat transfer. I have always used it for automotive external aerodynamics. That being said, I am looking to expand my knowledge for a personal project I am going to be doing.

I am looking to model my design using CAD (ProE) and mesh using snappyHexMesh. It would be internal flow of water/glycol through copper/aluminum tubing in a coil under ground. I would like to run a steady state incompressible analysis that calculates heat transfer. The flow would be turbulent, and I was think a k-omega sst turbulence model (is this best?).

So my questions are...

1. Any good tutorials to follow to get the basic idea? I have searched but I am failing to find anything.

2. What solver should I use since heat transfer will be implemented?

3. How should I setup the blockMesh and snappyHexMesh is this situation?

4. Is my assumption of using a k-omega sst turbulence model correct? This is what I have found on the little information I was able to locate.

The picture of the real thing I am trying to simulate is below.

http://olearyplumbingandheating.biz/...Geothermal.jpg

Plucas,

Let me try to answer a few of these

1. There are fluid solid problems in the heat transfer folder in tutorials.

2. If you want to capture the pipe heating and local heating of the soil outside your pipe, try chtMultiRegionSimpleFoam. However, you may be able to do this more simply with a flux at the wall and then use simpleFoam with a temperature field added (http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...tml#post280210). However, since the pipes may be overlapping and touching...you may be stuck with the more complicated and time consuming solvers.

3. Depends on the case, but you want nice refined mesh at the wall and through the boundary layer in the pipe.

4. You can try multiple turbulence models, but this one is a good one.

Thanks for the response