Abstract :
[en] To alleviate the computational burden of the nite element method for thermal analyses
involving conduction and radiation, this paper proposes an automatic conductive-radiative
reduction process based on the clustering of a detailed mesh coming from a structural model
for instance. The proposed method leads to a signi cant reduction of the number of radiative
exchange factors (REFs) to compute and size of the corresponding matrix. It further
keeps accurate conduction information by introducing the concept of physically meaningful
super nodes. The REFs between the super nodes are computed through Monte Carlo
ray-tracing on the partitioned mesh, preserving the versatility of the method. The resulting
conductive-radiative reduced model is solved using standard iterative techniques and the
detailed mesh temperatures can be recovered from the super nodes temperatures for further
thermo-mechanical analysis. The proposed method is applied to a structural component
of the Meteosat Third Generation mission and is benchmarked against ESATAN-TMS, the
standard thermal analysis software used in the European aerospace industry.
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