I am trying to analyze the chimney/stack effect created between solar panels and the roof they are installed on at different height and angles. I have some simplified geometry setup to represent the roof and an array of solar panels one foot above. I am using Conjugate Heat transfer v2.02 and have set the solar load via the solar calculator. My issue comes when I attempt to apply a wall boundary condition to the roof and solar panel surfaces and then mesh, it tells me I cannot have a bc and interface on the same surface. Should I be removing the solid bodies after the fluid domain creation because from what I see in the documentation that is not needed when using CHT. Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated. This is my first simscale project, I have only used Ansys fluent and StarCCM in the past.
Good morning! On the CHT solver, the interfaces between regions (in your case between the big faces between aluminium and the air) are always treated as walls:
- For the fluid equations: No-slip velocity, zero gradient pressure
- Fully coupled for the temperature (The temperature for both regions at the interface is the same)
- Opaque grey walls with the material emissivity for the radiative equation
This means that you do not need to input any BC for interfaces. For your case, the emissivity of the solar panel (I think the material called Aluminium) will be very important, but it seems 0.9 is a reasonable value for a solar panel. Have fun simulating!
Thank you for clearing that up! How does it treat the solar load when the walls BC are automatically applied? When I run the simulation it seems the solar load is only being applied to the fluid domain surfaces adjacent to the actual solid bodies and not the solid bodies themselves.
