Hello,
I have been using Calculix and the various front ends like MECWAY and PrePoMax as a simulation tool for small thermal problems, typically only comprising conduction and convection for which it works very well.
I have recently been exploring its use for performing surface to surface radiation exchange. It appears from poking around that there are typically two issues I see most having with such analyses which are either inaccurate results or excessively long calculation times for view factors.
I not so recently recall playing around with this area of the tool and recall that the view factors that are output don’t appear to be in a readable or editable format (although I may be recalling incorrectly). Is there any way to substitute the view factor calculation step (pre-calculated, not changing during simulation) from an external tool on the same geometry? I was thinking of an external MCRT type tool that might speed up and increase accuracy to circumvent these apparent issues.
Check the *VIEWFACTOR, READ, INPUT=… keyword. It’s meant specifically for that.
http://www.dhondt.de/ccx_2.22.pdf#subsection.7.140
Btw. CalculiX uses parallelization when calculating viewfactors.
Hi,
Sorry if that’s a silly question but, Is there a way to Output the computed *VIEWFACTORS in such a way that they can be read to make some checks?. Seems output deliver them only in binary.
Thanks
Unfortunately, only this binary format is possible. Abaqus outputs view factor matrices to .fil file and its format can be changed to ASCII but it’s still not really readable.
Thank you very much for the response