Conjugate heat transfer
Conjugate heat transfer (CHT) in OpenFOAM, set up from a GUI
Solid and fluid regions solved together with a coupled interface — electronics cooling, heat exchangers, cooling channels — using chtMultiRegionFoam without hand-writing the region setup.
What it is
Heat moving between a fluid and a solid where neither temperature can be assumed. The domain is split into regions that are solved together, coupled at their shared interfaces, rather than imposing a wall temperature you would have had to know in advance.
What the application sets up
- Multi-region decomposition with the fluid and solid regions identified
- Coupled thermal boundary conditions at every solid–fluid interface
- Per-region material properties from the materials library
- The extra fields a compressible thermal solve needs, per region
Typical uses
- Electronics cooling — board, heatsink and airflow together
- Heat exchanger cores
- Cooling channels in a casting or a mould
- Insulation performance where the solid conducts significantly
Industries
Sectors where this analysis is routinely asked for.
- Electronics cooling
- Power generation
- Automotive thermal
- Process equipment
What comes out
- Temperature fields in fluid and solid
- Component hot-spot locations
- Interface heat flux
- Heat transfer coefficients computed, not guessed
OpenFOAM solvers
chtMultiRegionFoamchtMultiRegionSimpleFoam
Selected and configured for you from the analysis type. You can still see every dictionary the application writes.
In every tier
This analysis type is in the free build. The free tier limits mesh size to 250,000 cells and solving to one core — not which physics you may use.
On accuracy, plainly.