I mainly work with aerodynamics, but I have been looking into different types of radiators recently and I wanted to test some out. I was looking at the different options for heat transfer simulations, but I do not really understand them. Is there a type of simulation where I can simulate the air flowing by a radiator and the fluid flowing through the radiator to test the cooling effect?
Radiators can be difficult to explicitly model because the geometries tend to be very complex. For that reason it’s common to see radiators being modeled as porous media + power sources (with negative values).
In any case, if you are solving for the energy equation, the go-to solver would be conjugate heat transfer, as it supports fluid-only, solid-only, and fluid + solid studies.
The radiator I was planning on modeling would be a lot simpler.