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.

This tutorial describes the use of the single simulation, multi-timescale conjugate heat transfer (CHT) method for the heating of an exhaust manifold in a cold-start scenario.

To capture the pulsated flow pattern, the exhaust gas is solved with a time step size corresponding to 2 degrees of crank angle, whereas the solid manifold is solved with a much larger time step size corresponding to 2 engine cycles.

The following table gives you an overview of the simulation:

Solid Domain Fluid Domain
Physics Models
  • Material: Ductile Iron
  • Equation of State: Constant Density
  • Material: Air
  • Equation of State: Ideal Gas
  • Flow Regime: Turbulent
Boundary Conditions
  • Thermal specification for outer boundaries: Convection
  • Temperature at inlets: Time-accurate 1D table
  • Mass flow at inlets: Time-accurate 1D table
Initialization
  • Temperature: 300 K
  • Temperature: 300 K
Type of Analysis Transient (thermal process) Transient (pulsated engine flow)
Discretization and Solution Method Finite Volume (FV) Finite Volume (FV)
Mesh Polyhedral Cells Polyhedral Cells