A Fast Algorithm For Thermal Analysis On A Dense Mesh

The design of the thermal management system on military vehicles relies on simulation to analyze the interactions with the entire vehicle. It is critical analyze these systems with full vehicle models. These models employ CFD solvers to obtain the heat transfer coefficients needed as boundary conditions to a transient thermal solution, but these solvers operate on a dense mesh that is too large to do transient simulations of full vehicles. Thus a coupled transient thermal solution is performed on a much smaller mesh. It is desirable to use the high density CFD mesh for both solvers, but the large number and characteristics of the surface elements make them impractical for use with conventional thermal solvers. ThermoAnalytics is proposing to implement a new thermal solution algorithm in MuSES. The new algorithm will employ advanced simultaneous equation solvers that incorporate automatic mesh coarsening techniques, and will formulate the highly coupled radiation solution so it can be effectively parallelized, thus taking advantage of high-performance computing clusters or massively parallel general purpose graphics processing units. This new version of MuSES will produce transient thermal solutions on domains defined by a high density surface mesh in a time frame supporting modern vehicle design cycles.