Application of CFD to Solve Difficult Industry Thermal Stress Problems

Temperature variation is the source of load in pure thermal stress analysis; thus, meaningful prediction of temperatures in a structure is critical to analysis success. Temperature measurement and standard heat transfer correlations should be the basis of the majority of heat transfer analysis. However, there is a class of problems where temperature measurement is not possible or feasible and standard heat transfer correlations are not applicable. For cases such as these, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provides a valuable tool to better assess the fluid/thermal behavior in complex configurations, and thus the resulting temperature gradients within a structure. Several practical examples that illustrate the value of CFD in thermal stress analysis are detailed in this paper.