February 2025 critical fixes

February 2025 fixes were published on 20 February 2025. All critical fixes listed here were fixed for versions 2412.5, 2406.9 unless otherwise noted.

Bug 99699: Incorrect elemental convective heat flux values are reported in post-processing for convection couplings applied between 2D elements and 1D duct elements in both transient and steady state solutions

When a convection coupling is applied between 2D elements and 1D duct elements, the elemental convective heat flux values are reported incorrectly in post-processing, whereas the nodal convective heat flux values are accurate. This issue occurs in both steady-state and transient solutions, and affects both the element CG and finite element discretization methods. This bug has been corrected.

Bug 99976: In the absence of a convective area factor, inconsistencies with default values are seen in post-processing, where the nodal convective area factor is reported as 0 and the elemental convective area factor is reported as 1

An inconsistency between elemental and nodal convective area factor computations was discovered when no area correction was specified for convective boundary conditions such as thermal convecting zone, thermal stream, and thermal void. In post-processing, the elemental convective area factor results were correctly reported as 1, whereas the nodal convective area factor results were incorrectly reported as 0. During the correction of this bug, it was also discovered that when a node belongs to four elements, the interpolated value was not computed; instead, the minimum of the elemental values was assigned. Since this additional fix is more general, it could potentially impact all nodal results. The issues corrected only affect models using the finite element discretization method.

Bug 102620: Fix fatal error at initial iteration in the flow solver when a recirculation loop is defined by a fan curve with convective heat exchange specified

The flow solver previously did not support models with a recirculation loop boundary condition defined by a fan curve and a convective heat exchange type, which led to a fatal error. In this scenario, the solver would start with a zero mass flow rate in the first iteration, causing a division by zero error when computing the return temperature. This error has been fixed.