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Thermal Solver
Contains thermal solver related guides, such as the TMG reference manual, thermal API guide, and error message list.
Thermal solver theory
Describes the theory and methods of the thermal solver.
Convective heat transfer methods
The thermal solver computes convection conductances for various geometrical configurations using correlations that depend on specified characteristic lengths, convective surfaces, and type of convection.

Thermal Solver
Contains thermal solver related guides, such as the TMG reference manual, thermal API guide, and error message list.
- Thermal solver guides
  Maya HTT's thermal solver is included in Simcenter 3D and in Simcenter Femap. This page contains links to thermal solver guides, which help you understand how the thermal solver works.
- Thermal solver theory
  Describes the theory and methods of the thermal solver.
  - Introduction
    This guide provides the theory and methods used by the thermal solver, including methods to calculate conduction, convection, and radiation, as well as modeling specific topics using the thermal solver.
  - Conduction methods
    To model heat conduction, the thermal solver can use two finite volume methods, center of element method or element's center of gravity method, or the finite element method.
  - Convective heat transfer methods
    The thermal solver computes convection conductances for various geometrical configurations using correlations that depend on specified characteristic lengths, convective surfaces, and type of convection.
    - Free convection correlations
      Free or natural convection occurs when the heat is transferred between convective surfaces and a moving fluid, in which the fluid motion is not induced by an external force.
    - Across gap convection correlations
    - Forced convection correlations
    - Multiple convective boundary conditions on the same selection
      This section describes how the thermal solver calculates convective heat flow and post-processing outputs when multiple convective boundary conditions are applied on the same geometric selection.
  - Radiation exchange methods
    Thermal radiation is a heat transfer due to electromagnetic radiation emitted by the surface of bodies due to their temperature.
  - Miscellaneous topics
  - References
- Thermal solver API guide
  Allows you to create or add functionality to enhance the thermal solver capabilities.

Convective heat transfer methods

The thermal solver computes convection conductances for various geometrical configurations using correlations that depend on specified characteristic lengths, convective surfaces, and type of convection.

The heat flow, q, between the surface and the fluid is described by:

where:

T_s and T_f are the surface and fluid temperatures.
A is the convective surface area.
h is the heat transfer coefficient computed by the solver as:
_Nu is the Nusselt number computed from convective correlations.
L is the specified characteristic convective surface length.
k is the thermal conductivity of the fluid.
M is a specified multiplier, which is equal to 1 by default.

The following dimensionless groups are defined for the fluid in correlations:

The Prandtl number is:
The Rayleigh number is:
where:
- T_sA is the absolute temperature of convecting surface (K).
- g is the magnitude of the acceleration due to gravity.
- μ is the viscosity of the fluid.
- ρ is the fluid density.
- C_p is the specific heat of the fluid.