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Heat Transfer Simulation

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eliou

Mechanical
Nov 23, 2006
41
Hey guys,

I'm trying to run a simulation for a heat sink operating with natural convection. Does anyone know how to define the direction of gravity in solidworks simulation?

Thanks for the help in advance
 
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In simulation you do not specify gravity, you specify the convection coefficient. A rough estimate is 9.8w/m-k on all the surfaces that will be used for natural convection. You will also have to run multiple iterations calculating the bulk air temp around your heat sink and entering in a new bulk temp and re-running until the bulk temp stops changing. I have found that this takes about 4-5 iterations/runs of the simulation to get a final result.

If you change over to Flow simulation then you will enter the gravitational directing and the software will calculate the convection coefficients and run all the iterations for you so when the simulation ends you have reach the final result.
 
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