HEATER

Overview

HEATER is a program for the analysis of transient and steady-state heat transfer by heat conduction in three-dimensional solids. HEATER computes the evolution of an initial distribution of temperature in solid materials subjected to volumetric heating/cooling, with prescribed boundary conditions. It is based on a general 3-D finite element solver of Partial Differential Equations (PDE). The use of finite elements allows optimal flexibility on the modeled geometry, the heat sources and the boundary conditions considered.

Details

  • Finite element simulation of heat conduction in solids at cryogenic temperature, subject to arbitrary heating source terms, and a combination of temperature and heat flux boundary conditions.

  • Arbitrary assembly of 1-D, 2-D and 3-D finite elements to represent "truss", "shell" and "solid" structures, lets the user chose the best level of simplification and approximation.

  • Material properties from the CryoSoft material library are included and can be directly referenced in the input preparation.

  • The solver uses multi-step finite difference integrator in time (up to third order accurate). Automatic time step adaptivity is used to control the integration errors and to cope with strong variations in the solution.

  • Extensive user's defined routines to allow easy-to-use interfacing to user's specific applications.

  • Graphic (Postscript) post-processor included in the package to select results and provide simple views of the solution.

Finite element library  

The following element types are available in the present version of HEATER. A mesh can contain an arbitrary mix of all element types, provided it respects geometric and topologic constraints as imposed by the finite element method.

LINE: 1-D line elements (truss), linear (2 nodes) and parabolic (3 nodes)

TRIA: 2-D triangle elements (shell), linear (3 nodes) and parabolic (6 nodes)

QUAD: 2-D quadrilateral elements (shell), linear (4 nodes) and parabolic (serendipity, 8 nodes, and lagrangian, 9 nodes)

TETR: 3-D tetrahedral elements (solid), linear (4 nodes) and parabolic (10 nodes)

PYRA: 3-D pyramid/wedge elements (solid), linear (6 nodes) and parabolic (15 nodes)

HEXA: 3-D hexahedral elements (solid), linear (8 nodes) and parabolic (20 nodes)

Version  

April 2021, version 2.1a

Installations

  • Mac OSX (native development platform)

  • Linux (e.g. RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and other distributions)

  • UNIX (e.g. AIX on RISC-6000, Solaris on Sun-Spark, DEC Alpha, HP UX, and other)

  • CYGWIN (port available to run under Windows, not supported)

On-line documentation  

Download the manual in Pdf format for the latest version of HEATER.

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