Publication: Adaptive finite element analysis of heat conduction in a heat pipe with wick structures
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Date
2008-04-01
Authors
Teoh, Say Lai
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Abstract
Self-adaptive mesh and order approximation function in the finite element analysis tool helps to automatically refine, coarsen, or relocate a mesh and adjust the basis to acquire a solution having a specified accuracy in an optimal way. With proper utilization of this tool, it will improve the way of solving engineering problems by obtaining the desired solution with minimal effort. Simulation tasks on the steady state heat conduction model of modulated wick structure heat pipe is carried out to determine the performance of PolyDE, a stand-alone finite element analysis programme with self-adaptive mesh and element approximation orders developed at the Institute for Micro System Technology at Hamburg University of Technology. The performance of the different adaptive methods include p-adapt, h-adapt and hp-adapt are tested. An optimal solution is achieved by h-adapt and hp-adapt method. The performance comparison with commercial package ANSYS® 9.0 was also been carried out to show the ability of the PolyDE programme to achieve an optimal solution which compatible with current commercialize developed finite element analysis package. The simulation on both PolyDE and ANSYS® is carried out using h-adapt method. The starting condition of both simulations is adjusted to a merely similar condition which has a similar number of degrees of freedom and elements. The performance of PolyDE is found to be on par with the ANSY® programme. The PolyDE programme shows an advantage on achieving a result with lower relative error compare to ANSYS® but record a longer computational time.