Validation of a Thermal Radiation Problem using *BOUNDARY_RADIATION_ENCLOSURE

Thermal radiation problems are gaining interest in the automotive industry. Examples include paint drying and curing processes, determining material characteristics and deformation due to heat treatment, temperature distributions in muffler systems and heat shields in engine compartments. LS-DYNA has capabilities to couple the thermal solver with mechanical and multi physics solver. Solving for thermal convection, conduction and contact in three dimensions are already available in all parallel models LSTC are offering, namely shared memory parallel (SMP), massive parallel processor (MPP) and the combination of both models (HYBRID). Lately the thermal radiation feature has been extended to be used with massive parallel processor (MPP) version and a new solver to solve for radiosity. New developments are tested with verification examples and small test cases to determine the code functionality and expected results. Furthermore they have to show their applicability with validations of numerical models with experimental data. They also need to be evaluated regarding their scalability of wall clock time to reduce costs of compute resources. This contribution addresses two of these subjects, the scalability and the validation. The validation example used here is a part of a B-pillar which is heated up in an oven. Temperatures were measured at several locations of the sheet metal. Test data was provided by Honda R&D Americas, Inc. The test was modeled as a thermal radiation problem in an enclosure. Thermal radiation was modeled using the keyword *BOUNDARY_RADIATION_ENCLOSURE and was performed in LS-DYNA MPP. An LS-DYNA MPP scalability study was performed. Due to missing data for the thermal parameters, the heat capacity, thermal conductivity and emissivity were determined with LS-OPT.