Product: Abaqus/Standard
Benefits: You can now model heat transfer in a fully coupled manner with pore fluid flow and mechanical deformation in porous media such as soil. In previous releases, thermal coupling had to be accounted for in a sequential manner, which involved solving a heat transfer analysis to solve for the temperature field, followed by a consolidation analysis with the precomputed temperature specified as a predefined field.
Description: Both geostatic and coupled pore fluid diffusion/stress analysis can now model heat transfer fully coupled with pore fluid flow and mechanical deformations, when either is used with a domain that consists of the new coupled temperature–pore pressure elements. The new coupled temperature–pore pressure elements are similar to the existing family of pore pressure elements with the important difference that they have temperature as a nodal degree of freedom in addition to pore pressure and displacement. The fully coupled approach is important in situations where there is a strong coupling between pore fluid flow and heat transfer and the temperature field has a relatively strong dependence on the stresses and the pore pressure. For example, changes in the pore pressure may affect the flow rates, which in turn may affect the temperature distribution due to the modified convection rates. These procedures can still be used in a pure consolidation analysis without heat transfer effects either by using pore pressure displacement elements or by turning off the temperature degrees of freedom for the new fully coupled elements.
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