Support Surface Materials for Joule Heating Analysis

[Royce_adsk]

When running a joule heating analysis it is very common to have surface contacts between connectors. Currently, to model those contacts you need to model them as volumes which isn't as straight forward and requires a fair amount of mesh at each contact location.

There is no indication that surface materials wouldn't work for joule heating problems, but making a simple model proves that heat is not generated at these surface contacts.

[a.schwert]

Hello, 

are there anny news to this topic? 

I have the same problem... 

[a.schwert]

I have found out, that there is a meshing error when replacing the CAD model of a thin shell element with a surface.
If you load a surface instead of a volume and later give it a material with a virtual wall thickness in the CFD program, the mesh is not generated correctly.
Boundary layers are only generated on one side of the surface. But this is not correct, boundary layers would have to be created on both sides of the surface.

I would like to know if Autodesk is aware of these errors.

Do you think this could be the error to solve your problem? Boundary layers are very important for thermal heat transfer from fluids to solids.