Hello,
i want to simulate the thermal conductance of two pieces of metal that are pressed together with screws. Since i want to simulate a relatively large temperature range the force/displacement pressing the pieces together would not be constant since the screws and materials elongate differently, is that possible in prepomax?
I found the option for boundarie conditions to set a fixed displacement and know how to simulate a hertz contact, but i am not too confident that those will help me because i haven’t found a way so define stuff like surface roughness that i would need for accurate results.
Thanks for the help
You can account for thermal expansion even in a purely mechanical analysis. Temperature can be applied as defined field in a static step. Then each material will contract/expand based on its thermal expansion property.
There are two main types of thermal interfaces - tie constraint (perfect mechanical bonding and perfect heat transfer) and contact (possible sliding/separation and heat transfer based on the specified gap conductance).
Gap conductance in contact is defined as conductance vs contact pressure. It may also vary with temperature.
Thank you, helped me a lot. I tried simulating quite a few things since my last post
Ultimately i want to simulate a coldhead in contact with a heat shield. i managed to simulate the heatshield in two variations: with the contact area to the coldhead set to a fixed temperature and a variable temperature flux. this both worked.
but in order to get accurate results i would need to have two bodies (shield and coldhead) and the coldhead would need a variable cooling power thats variable by Temperature. I found and used the amplitude function, but that is only time variable (afaik), is there a possibility to define cooling power by temperature of an object/node in prepomax?
thanks for the help
Not with built-in CalculiX features. This would likely require the use of a Fortran subroutine.