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Understanding the thermal distribution within a material either dynamically or at steady state, due to continuous or variable environmental conditions, is often required in engineering situations. This is due to the effect of temperature on material strengths and the expansion/contraction of the material causing physical changes to the nominal design, with implications on thermally induced stressing.
eStress Solutions provide thermal analysis facilities for simple components which may be assessed by using standard tools of radiation exchange, convection/conduction energy balances, combined convection and radiation/conduction assessments, and so on. For more complex situations either Finite Element Analysis can be used, where the external conditions are fairly well understood and the conduction routes within the structure are complex, or where the reverse is true, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis may be used.
CFD is also the route to solving complex fluid flow problems with or without temperature effects. Solutions may be given for internal or external surfaces and are increasingly becoming more usable and acceptable as recent advances have been made in the available software.
For more simple fluid flow analyses, such as internal pipe flow networks, solutions obtained using energy balances with empirically derived pressure loss coefficients are still very effective and reliable. Computational methods can rapidly define the problem and solve for both gas and liquid flows either transiently or at steady state. |
