Analysis Workflow

This tutorial illustrates the typical analysis workflow on the example of heat conduction in 2D.

All the files in this tutorial can be downloaded here.

Problem Definition

We consider stationary heat conduction through a wall in 2D. Temperatures are given for the left and right boundary. No heat flux through the top and bottom boundary.

What is the heat flux through the wall?

Sketch of the domain

  ___________
 |           |    ^
 |           |    |
 |   wall    |    b
 |           |    |
 |___________|    v

 <---- a ---->

Boundary Conditions

We set Dirichlet BCs at the left and right side of the domain directly defining the temperature. Since nothing is set on the top and bottom boundary, the natural BC is used, whih physically enforces zero normal heat flux.

Meshing

We use the Cubit GUI to create the domain:

1. Start it by typing cubit on the terminal.
2. Create a rectange
3. Mesh it
4. Assign and rename a Block for the wall domain
5. Use Nodeset for the boundaries
6. Export the mesh as a ANSYS-cdb file

The file wall.cdb was created this way.

Simulation with CFS

Use an XML-editor (e.g. oXygen or eclipse) to define the simulation input for CFS.

The input file simulation-input.xml is the simulation input. In the file mat.xml the material porperties are defined. Both files are complete, and can be used for the example problem.

To start the computation run the following command in the terminal

cfs -p simulation-input.xml job

where job can be any name you choose for the simulation.

CFS will write some output on the terminal, and produce the two files * job.info.xml, which contains some details about the run, and * job.cfs in the results_hdf5 directory, which you can view with ParaView.

Postprocessing with ParaView

Open ParaView (by typing paraview in a terminal) and load the result file using File, Open... then click Apply.