Open Access

ARTICLE

Large-Scale 3D Thermal Transfer Analysis with 1D Model of Piped Cooling Water

Shigeki Kaneko¹, Naoto Mitsume², Shinobu Yoshimura^1,*

1 Department of Systems Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan
2 Institute of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8573, Japan

* Corresponding Author: Shinobu Yoshimura. Email: -tokyo.ac.jp

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Advances in Methods of Computational Modeling in Engineering Sciences, a Special Issue in Memory of Professor Satya Atluri)

Digital Engineering and Digital Twin 2024, 2, 33-48. https://doi.org/10.32604/dedt.2023.044279

Received 26 July 2023; Accepted 05 December 2023; Issue published 31 January 2024

Abstract

In an integrated coal gasification combined cycle plant, cooling pipes are installed in the gasifier reactor and water cooling is executed to avoid reaching an excessively high temperature. To accelerate the design, it is necessary to develop an analysis system that can simulate the cooling operation within the practical computational time. In the present study, we assumed the temperature fields of the cooled object and the cooling water to be governed by the three-dimensional (3D) heat equation and the one-dimensional (1D) convection-diffusion equation, respectively. Although some existing studies have employed similar modeling, the applications have been limited to simple-shaped structures. However, our target application has a complex shape. The novelty of the present study is to develop an efficient numerical analysis system that can handle cooling analysis of complicated-shaped structures, of which modeling needs a huge number of degrees of freedom (DOFs). To solve the thermally coupled problem between the cooled object and cooling water, we employed a partitioned approach with non-matching meshes. For the heat transfer analysis of the cooled object, we employed an open-source large-scale parallel solver based on the 3D finite element method, named ADVENTURE_Thermal. For the convective heat transfer analysis of the cooling water in pipes, a 1D discontinuous Galerkin method-based solver of a convection-diffusion equation was developed and used. The proposed analysis system was first verified by solving a problem on water cooling of concrete, for which an analytical solution is already available. Then, using the supercomputer “Fugaku”, we performed a cooling analysis of a laboratory-scale coal gasifier reactor, which has complicated geometry and is modeled by over 20 million DOFs, and demonstrated the practical performance of the proposed system.

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Keywords

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