Originally Posted by Neo_Zeo (Post 640547)

or do you think it would be more interesting the use of Maxwell or Ansys Mechanical?

Originally Posted by LuckyTran (Post 640647)

Woah those are three very different modelling packages. What physical process are you modelling? Btw you posted this in the Fluent forum, so I'm guessing fluid flow effects should be important.

I need to study the best way to position a reflector to improve the light reflexion. I need to improve the light flux reflected from a determined geometry.



It would indeed be very interesting to see someone trying to model thermal radiation using Maxwell or Mechanical... because I'm not sure how you would model radiation at all.

Ansys mechanical is a structural package which has very little to do with light propagation or heat transfer. But if you're analyzing structural loads, then you don't need details of the radiation and heat transfer processes since the solids do not couple strongly to light propagation or fluid dynamics.

In Ansys Mechanical, in a thermal analysis I can study radiation:

https://confluence.cornell.edu/displ...erical+Results

But I really dont know the difference between this type of study in Fluent or Mechanical.

Maxwell solves E&M (Maxwell)relations, which is suitable for E&M fields, but not suitable for ray tracing. Fluent is really good at Ray Tracing and surface 2 surface radiation, it has some capabilities to do participating media, but it's suitable for dealing with electromagnetic induction for example. By itself, Maxwell doesn't solve Navier-Stokes so you're very limited in the fluid flow problems you can model.

You are right. I experimented with Maxwell, and it "just" works with magnetic and electrical phenomena. Not radiation.

Originally Posted by LuckyTran (Post 640748)

Fluent can certainly do the ray tracing or surface to surface radiation problem for you. But it still may be too complicated a tool. For starters, most of ray tracing and s2s radiation you can do by simple hand-calculations. There's not much benefit you can get out of Fluent except to do these for "complex problems."

In mechanical you don't study radiation, you simply model its effects on your solid. I.e. when I stand in the sun, the radiation heats my face and my face feels warm. Mechanical allows you to model this heating and warmness but it doesn't tell you how the radiation got there or the nature of the radiation. All it cares is that, hmms, there's some heat!

The Maxwell relations are the appropriate governing equations for radiation (E&M), but they are probably way too high order for your need as you don't really care about the distinction between electric and magnetic fields.