Numerical Simulation of Transient Thermal Convection of Heated Plate

Accurate simulation of long term transient thermal convection is critical to automotive related thermal and fluid flow applications. For instance, long term thermal transients are relevant to “key-off” situations in which a moving vehicle brought to a stop leads to a usual initial spike in temperature followed by a drop as the heat sources are turned off.

Presented are simulations of a simple tube and plate configuration that captures the contribution of all heat transfer effects and complexities of a vehicle key-off process. The simulations were performed using a coupling between the flow solver and the thermal simulation package that includes conduction and radiation effects.

The simulation results were compared with the test data for steady state forced convection cases and transient natural convection cases. Good agreement was observed for both steady and transient simulations.