Modelling Heat Transfer of a Lamp
 

I've created a lampshade suitable for 3D printing and I would like to determine the maximum wattage incandescent bulb which will not surpass the material's safe operating temperature. (I've also modelling the entire lamp)

I've read the first two chapters of the openFOAM user guide, and I feel pretty confident about converting the blender model to graded cells and specifying boundaries, however I'm not sure which model/solver I should use. I could use some help with the "big picture" approach. These are the specifics I would like to model:

• Which models/solvers do I use to simulate radiation (lightbulb->shade), convection (bulb->air, air->shade, shade->air), and conduction (bulb->air, air->shade, shade->shade, shade->air) and hook these all together?

• How do I generate a radiative view factor from an IES light distribution file [http://image.tradett.com/images/newayledlighting/20130318162442715927591.jpg] of a light bulb?

• Do I need any special handling of infrared - incandescent light bulbs emit lots of infrared?

• Is convection turbulent?

the solver of interest here should be the chtMultiRegionFoam, which is basically a solver for conjugate heat transfer involving multiple regions. (in your case, the bulb, air and the shades). you can turn on the radiation model when running chtMultiRegionFoam, and there's few choices for radiation models, of which one is the view factor approach. I haven't dug too deep into it yet, but that should give you a starting point.

I believe it handles turbulent flows, check out the tutorial case in foam's chtMultiRegionFoam directory for detail of case setup.

Hope that helps!