Power Source

Power sources (formerly ‘Heat sources’) can be used to simulate heat generation from a volume. Application examples include electronic equipment and HVAC systems, e.g. to model heat generated by chips on a circuit board.

Preparation

SimScale currently supports power sources within two analysis types:

• Convective heat transfer
• Conjugate heat transfer

In both cases, the power source has to be assigned to a volume which can be one of the following:

• A CAD part (this only applies to Conjugate Heat Transfer as Convective Heat Transfer contains only the fluid volume)
• A geometry primitive (cartesian box, sphere, cylinder).
• A cell zone. (The advantage of this option, with respect to the geometry primitive, is that an arbitrary shape can be set as heat source.)

In the simulation tree, navigate to “Advanced Concepts” and add a Power source. Two types of power sources are supported:

Absolute power source

This type of source has to be used when the total power emitted by the heating element is known. The user is required to provide this value and to choose the relevant region of the domain.

Specific power source

This type of source has to be used when the power density is known. This is simply total power per unit volume. This quantity is often provided for batteries and fuel cells, for example.