Question about temperature boundary condition
 

I am simulating a simple case of fluid heated by a hot pipe with chtmultiregionFoam. I do not want to impose any temperature boundary condition at the outlet and observe rise in the temperature of the fluid as it moves from inlet to outlet.

What condition I must use??

Here are contents of my T file.

I assume this is your T file for the fluid region. Therefore the T file of the solid regions is missing.

Can you specify how you process the multiple regions? Usually the splitMeshRegions utility creates patches named <solidRegion_i>_to_<*> and <fluidRegion_j>_to_<*>. This has obviously not happend in your case, but might be OK, if you use third party software for mesh generation, e.g. enGrid does split the regions with its export function.

The next step would be to clarify where your heat source and heat sink is. Otherwise you end up with an isothermal domain.

Thanks for the reply.

My other T file looks this


But what it has to do will the other T files?? Am just curious.


About the mesh creation: I create my mesh in Ansys meshing, import it in fluent, delete interface, convert the interface to interior, save case, convert case file to foam, and use splitmeshregion. This gives me three regions.

I'm not familiar with your mesh generation process, but it seems to work fine.
How do you get 3 regions? You have got the fluid inside the pipe and the pipe itself. Where is the third one? A surrounding fluid?

With respect to your fluid T file:
inlet: fixedValue -> 278K set
outlet: inletOutlet -> zeroGradient, if the flux vector is pointing outwards your boundary patch face and fixedValue (in your case 278K) in case of backflow, i.e. the flux is pointing inwards.
innerfluid2pipe: thermally coupled

This looks so far reasonable.

Looking at the T file for your solid, I recognize, that you specify at pipe2innerfluid, that the solid kappa is the same as the fluid kappa, i.e. I would expect: kappa -> solidThermo.

By applying fixedValue 300K to the outerwalls patch you create a heat source. The heat is then transported by conduction (depending on the thermal conductivity of your solid) to the pipe2innerfluid patch, which is thermally coupled with your fluid, making the fluid the heat sink. Given that the fluid is kept at 278K at the inlet, only a small increase in temperature will be observed at the outlet.

So can you explain in detail, what exactly your problem is?

Thank you for your comments.

Sorry i described mesh generation for some other case. I have 2 regions one fluid and one is pipe.

The pipe is hot (relative to fluid) and the hot pipe heats up the cold fluid. I ran some test cases and they seem to be going fine. No other errors and the temperature of the fluid coming out at the outlet also seems reasonable.

My concern was that since I am putting a temperature value for the outlet (value uniform 278;) the temperature would remain 278 and not increase.

Next I am planning to extend it to three and more regions for heat exchange. Right now I am just ensuring that everything works with this basic case.

You are welcome

I copied that condition from tutorial 'multiRegionHeater' and 'multiRegionLiquidHeater'. Could you please elaborate on the reason for using ' kappa -> solidThermo' instead of ' kappa -> fluidThermo'.

Could you please answer that last question??

In my OF 2.2.2 installation the T files of the multiRegionHeater tutorial are as follows:

heater (solid region):
whereas for bottomAir (fluid region)
which sounds reasonable to me, as ones specifies the thermal conductivity (kappa) of the active region.

This was fruitful discussion. thanks again and see you around!!