[aspect-devel] questions about heat flux

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

On 09/30/2016 01:17 PM, Bremner,Paul M wrote:
> At the moment I'm running the cookbook prm files at the moment in order
> to verify that things are running well, and to get experience with the
> process before I move on to new projects. My expectation of higher
> values are from earth-like 3-d heat flux values where I'd expect to see
> on the order 10^12 W through the surface. I see only on the order 10^6
> W. This may be okay since I'm only in the 2-d case, I have not gone
> through the math yet, but this seemed low and I wanted to be sure what
> the output values represented. The units that were output have only
> watts instead of W/m (again, I'm in the 2-d case), which led me to think
> it was an integrated value, or total heat flux through the surface. The
> manual is not clear on this point (note that I haven't read the whole
> manual yet), where in some places it refers to heat flux in W/m^2 and in
> other places hints at an integrated value. Should I always interpret
> these as W per unit? or is there an option for which behavior is output?

It's a heat flux, so the units are Watts. What Max described is the heat 
flux *density*, but that's not what we compute in the postprocessor. (It 
may be that we compute it in some kind of visualization postprocessor, 
but I don't recall.)

Best
  W.


-- 
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Wolfgang Bangerth          email:                 bangerth at colostate.edu
                            www: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~bangerth/