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Tutorials
Tutorials show you how to use Simcenter STAR-CCM+ for various applications in a step-by-step format with recommendations for setup, initialization and steps of the solution process specific to the application. Macro and simulation files are available for download for a large proportion of cases.
Heat Transfer and Radiation
The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for heat transfer, radiation, and thermal comfort.
Dual Stream Heat Exchanger: Car Radiator
Heat exchangers are devices that efficiently transfer heat from one medium to another. Some prominent examples of heat exchanger applications include car radiators, such as the one used in this tutorial, power plants and air-conditioning.

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Tutorials
Tutorials show you how to use Simcenter STAR-CCM+ for various applications in a step-by-step format with recommendations for setup, initialization and steps of the solution process specific to the application. Macro and simulation files are available for download for a large proportion of cases.
- Using Tutorial Macros and Files
  Macros, input files, and final simulation files for a range of tutorials are provided as an optional download package on the Support Center website. These macros and final simulation files are provided as an aid to the written tutorials, so that you can check your final results against the downloaded files, or against a simulation that is built and run using the macros.
- Introduction
  Welcome to the Simcenter STAR-CCM+ introductory tutorial. In this tutorial, you explore the important concepts and workflow. Complete this tutorial before attempting any others.
- Foundation Tutorials
  The foundation tutorials showcase the major features of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ in a series of short tutorials.
- Geometry
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for creating and working with parts and 3D-CAD.
- Mesh
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various STAR-CCM+ features for building CFD meshes.
- Incompressible Flow
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for incompressible fluid flows as well as porosity and solution recording
- Compressible Flow
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for compressible fluid flows as well as harmonic balance.
- Heat Transfer and Radiation
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for heat transfer, radiation, and thermal comfort.
  - Conjugate Heat Transfer: Heated Fin Introduction
    This tutorial incorporates both multi-region conjugate heat transfer and natural convection in a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulation.
  - Simulation Operations: Multi-Timescale Conjugate Heat Transfer
    Through simulation operations, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ provides an automated methodology by which you can include a multiple time-scale workflow in a single simulation.
  - Simulation Operations: Transient-transient Multi-Timescale Conjugate Heat Transfer
    An important analysis for automotive applications is to simulate the thermal behavior of components during cold-start conditions. As the timescales involved in fluctuating fluid behavior often varies significantly from the timescales in solid thermal behavior, it is not efficient to run an implicitly coupled conjugate heat transfer simulation. Simcenter STAR-CCM+ provides a coupling strategy that permits distinct transient timescales for the solid and fluid components.
  - Multi-Part Solid: Graphics Card Cooling
    This tutorial demonstrates how you can model multiple solid parts in a single continuum using the Multi-Part Solid physics model.
  - Natural Convection: Concentric Cylinders Introduction
    This tutorial demonstrates how to solve a natural convection problem in Simcenter STAR-CCM+.
  - Electronics Cooling Toolset: Natural Convection JEDEC
    Although many electronic devices benefit from cooling fans in removing excess heat, some devices rely on natural convection only. The Electronics Cooling Toolset includes a method for estimating cooling due to natural convection.
  - Electronics Cooling Toolset: Graphics Card Cooling
    When you are positioning fans that cool electronic components, the Electronics Cooling Toolset allows you to assess the impact that they have on removing heat. By comparing multiple designs, you can decide which arrangement gives you the best performance.
  - Dual Stream Heat Exchanger: Car Radiator
    Heat exchangers are devices that efficiently transfer heat from one medium to another. Some prominent examples of heat exchanger applications include car radiators, such as the one used in this tutorial, power plants and air-conditioning.
    - Prerequisites
      The instructions in the Dual Stream Heat Exchanger tutorial assume that you are already familiar with certain techniques in Simcenter STAR-CCM+.
    - Importing the Geometry
      This tutorial starts with importing the heat exchanger geometry in Parasolid format. The geometry consists of five parts: the air duct parts upstream and downstream of the heat exchanger core, the coolant base and top parts, and the heat exchanger core part.
    - Duplicating the Heat Exchanger Core
      The dual stream heat exchanger method requires you to create a second, collocated heat exchanger core part. To duplicate the imported heat exchanger core part in the same location, you use a Linear Pattern mesh operation with zero distance in each direction.
    - Creating Contacts between the Fluid Streams
      To allow the air flow and the coolant flow to pass through their corresponding heat exchanger core, you create contacts separately between the parts that represent the air stream of the heat exchanger and between the parts that represent the coolant stream.
    - Assigning Parts to Regions
      You create one region for each part of the heat exchanger, resulting in six regions: two for the air ducts, two for the coolant, and two for the heat exchanger core. By assigning all heat exchanger parts to regions at the same time, the interfaces between the separate regions are created from the contacts.
    - Generating the Volume Mesh
      You generate a trimmed cell volume mesh without prism layers. To improve the accuracy of the calculation, you refine the heat exchanger core by using a block-shaped volumetric refinement. The individual heat exchanger parts are meshed per-part, which makes the mesh non-conformal at the interface. You are required to use per-part meshing to mesh the two collocated core parts. Alternatively, you can use a Volume Mesh Pattern to mesh the duplicated core part.
    - Setting Up the Air and Coolant Physics Continua
      Physics models are required to define the behavior of the air and coolant continua.
    - Setting the Boundary Conditions
      The air stream enters the heat exchanger with a velocity of 20 m/s and a temperature of 35°C. The coolant stream has a mass flow of 1.8 kg/s at a a temperature of 107°C.
    - Modelling the Heat Exchanger Cores as Porous Media
      Typically, the small-scale channel structure of a radiator is not resolved by a mesh, but is modelled using porous media. In this tutorial, you use the porous regions approach to specify porosity coefficients for both the air and coolant heat exchanger cores, which yields a certain pressure drop for each stream.
    - Defining the Heat Transfer Between Air and Coolant
      To define the heat transfer between the hot and the cold streams, air and coolant, you use the Actual Flow Dual Stream heat exchanger method.
    - Plotting Outlet Temperatures and Heat Transfer
    - Visualizing the Temperature Distribution
      The temperature distribution is visualized on two perpendicular cross-sections of the heat exchanger.
    - Running the Simulation
      The simulation is run for 200 iterations.
    - Analyzing the Results
      The progress of the solution can be followed using the scalar scene and the plots that you created previously.
    - Summary
      The Dual Stream Heat Exchanger tutorial used a simplified water-cooled car radiator to introduce a variety of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features.
  - Surface-to-Surface Radiation: Thermal Insulator
    This tutorial incorporates gray thermal radiation in a Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulation.
  - Multiband Surface-to-Surface Radiation: Solar Collector
    This tutorial uses the simulation created for the Surface-to-Surface Radiation: Thermal Insulator.
  - Photon Monte Carlo Radiation: Headlamp
    Thermal management simulations of headlamp applications allow you to identify temperature hotspots that can cause damage to the headlamp. Modifying the design—for example, including heat shields in the right places—leads to better and more durable designs.
  - Thermal Comfort: Car Cabin
    Comfort is one of the main factors that consumers consider when deciding how they travel. Therefore, passenger comfort is one of the key criteria that influence the design process of enclosed spaces such as a car or aircraft cabin.
  - Parts-Based Shells: Exhaust Pipe
    Simcenter STAR-CCM+ provides support for thin-walled structures that are best represented by a single-cell layer during simulation. These single-cell layers are known as shells. One of the main advantages of using shell elements is that it reduces the computational time and resources required for simulations.
- Multiphase Flow
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for simulating multiphase fluid flow problems
- Discrete Element Method
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for simulating Discrete Element Method problems
- Motion
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various STAR-CCM+ features for simulating problems with moving geometries and meshes, dynamic fluid body interaction, and rigid body motion:
- Reacting Flow
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for simulating reacting flows such as combustion.
- Solid Stress
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for computing deformation, strain, and stresses in solid regions. They also show how such computations can be coupled to the fluid behavior in an analysis of fluid-structure interaction.
- Aeroacoustics
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for solving aeroacoustic simulations.
- Electromagnetism
  The following tutorials illustrate features for solving problems that involve electromagnetic fields.
- Electrochemistry
  The following tutorial demonstrates chemical reactions induced by an electrical current.
- Battery
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for setting up a battery model:
- Automation
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ automation and macro features.
- Design Exploration
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various features for running design exploration studies in Design Manager.
- Coupling with CAE Codes
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for coupling with CAE codes:
- Analysis Methods
  The tutorials in this set illustrate various Simcenter STAR-CCM+ features for analysing and visualizing simulation data.
- Simcenter STAR-CCM+ In-cylinder
  The tutorials in this set illustrate features for simulating internal combustion engines in Simcenter STAR-CCM+ using the dedicated add-on Simcenter STAR-CCM+ In-cylinder.

Dual Stream Heat Exchanger: Car Radiator

Heat exchangers are devices that efficiently transfer heat from one medium to another. Some prominent examples of heat exchanger applications include car radiators, such as the one used in this tutorial, power plants and air-conditioning.

The purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate the workflow for setting up a dual stream heat exchanger simulation in Simcenter STAR-CCM+.

The following diagram shows the geometry of the simplified car radiator:

The air stream enters the heat exchanger via the air inlet with a velocity of 20 m/s and a temperature of 35 °C. The coolant stream enters the heat exchanger via the coolant inlet at a mass flow rate of 1.8 kg/s and a temperature of 107 °C.

To model the heat transfer from the coolant stream to the air stream, you use the actual flow dual stream heat exchanger optiion. This heat exchanger option models the addition or removal of heat as a source/sink term to the energy equation of each fluid stream. This approach requires you to create two identical overlapping heat exchanger core regions, one for each stream. To facilitate the heat exchange between the two regions, you create a heat exchanger interface between them. The heat exchanger rate is determined by a UAG table that provides the overall heat transfer coefficient of the heat exchanger as a function of the mass flow rate of air.