[aspect-devel] Question regarding heat flux output

[John Naliboff]

Howdy all,

I'm currently doing some basic (2D, cartesian) Nusselt vs Rayleigh number comparisons with Aspect, and I have a few questions about the heat flux output along the boundaries.

For example, here is the output from one time step:
*** Timestep 32281:  t=9.33978e+07 years
   Solving temperature system... 1 iterations.
   Rebuilding Stokes preconditioner...
   Solving Stokes system... 3 iterations.

   Postprocessing:
     RMS, max velocity:                  1.34 m/year, 2.72 m/year
     Temperature min/avg/max:            0 K, 490.1 K, 1000 K
     Heat fluxes through boundary parts: -583.7 W, 643.2 W, -1.076e+05 W, 1.037e+05 W
     Advecting particles...              done. 

Above, the heat flux through the boundary parts is listed in terms of Watts (I assume "W" is for watts).  Are these values in fact the heat flux values integrated over the length of each boundary?  

Dividing by the length of the top boundary (1.e6 meters) gave reasonable values for the heat flux in terms of Rayleigh-Nusselt number scaling relationships, but I wanted to check and make sure the "heat flux" values listed above are indeed in Watts and represent the integrated heat flux over each boundary.  I confess I wasn't able to tell in heat_flux_statistics.cc if an integration was being done over the boundaries.

Thanks in advance for the clarification.

Cheers,
John

John Naliboff
Postdoctoral Scholar
Geology Department
University of California, Davis
Earth and Physical Sciences Bldg., Rm. 2119
Davis, CA 95616



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