I am simulating cooling the internals of an AC induction motor and have a few detailed questions:
- The motor has 72 identical coils but the inlet/outlet flow gemoetries are not axi-symetric so I often need to model an entire motor. The flow is forced incompressible (external fan). The coils are typically copper but are insulated over the entire surface with a thin layer fiber tape and coated in a resin. I would like to be able to model the lower thermal conductivity of this insulating material without creating a 'shell' of material around the entire surface of the individual coils (which would result in a crazy mesh due to its thinness relative to the rest of the geometry). I have seen that there are surface boundary conditions for solids but due to the complex shape of the coil, each coil may have 50+ surfaces (which means >350 surface boundary conditions total); is there an easier way to do this?
- The lamination steel in a motor generates heat non-uniformly (much more at the teeth and on the ID than in the back-iron). If I had a thermal data matrix (x,y,z,q) for specific heat production with the corresponding 3-spacial coordinates, could I import this data into a solid as a boundary condition? I am imagining perhaps a giant .csv where CFDesign could look-up/interpolate at each node or I could perhaps develop a multi-variate function and enter that for thermal output.
Any guidance is helpful.