Best computational tool that could be used for calculation of thermal stresses

[chetanladha]

Hi everyone.
I am working to find out temperature distribution and thermal stresses in a structure. Can anyone please advice on which could be the best computational tool (ANSYS or ABAQUS or any other) for such kind of calculations.
Thanks in advance.

 

[Mech_Engineer]

Define "best computational tool." Pretty much any standard Finite Element Analysis package is capable of the analysis you're looking for.

 

[chetanladha]

Thank you for your response.
I have been trying to use ANSYS Mechanical APDL, but i am finding it difficult to make a marine structure. I even tried to use a drafting package and export it to ANSYS (IGES format), but it didn't work out very well..
Could you suggest any other package?

 

[Mech_Engineer]

For a start, I would recommend using ANSYS Workbench and DesignModeler rather than APDL unless yuou're very familiar with the program's inner workings.

Second, I wouldn't use IGES as your geometry import/export format. I've found that using something like Parasolid or Step will yield much better results.

 

[AlephZero]

Define "best computational tool." Pretty much any standard Finite Element Analysis package is capable of the analysis you're looking for.

Pretty miuch any standard FE package will do a thermal stress calculation given a temperature distribution (i.e. the temperature at each mesh point of the FE model).

However the thermal analysis capabilities of different FE packages vary quite a lot, if you want to anything "complicated" like
- Convection boundary conditions with user-defined laws for heat transfer coefficients (typically the HTC would be a function of a few non-dimensional fluid dynamics parameters),
- Coupled fluid-solid thermal problems where heat is carried in the moving fluid,
- Phase changes like freezing or melting,
- The need for different meshes for the thermal and structural models,
- etc.