2024-07-10 –, Method (1.5)
In many engineering tasks like semiconductor fabrication or laser welding, we face the problem of simulating and controlling the heat conduction. To tackle this issue, we developed Hestia.jl - a Julia library to simply create heat conduction simulations for up to three dimensional models. It offers several options to specify material properties, boundary conditions and actuator configurations for realistic simulation scenarios. This enables us to simulate and control a thermal dynamics at once.
Heat conduction is a fundamental physical phenomena and an important research field in process engineering, production technology and material science. Thermal processes must be understood perfectly for example in semiconductor fabrication to produce high-quality microelectronics. Many general purpose solvers like FEniCS or Trixi.jl are used to simulate complex physical problems, but these software libraries often require deep knowledge of the mathematical models and their numerical approximations. In contrast, Hestia only focuses on heat conduction models and offers a toolkit for engineers to simply specify the desired physical behavior.
In this talk, we introduce Hestia.jl and we create step-by-step heat conduction simulations from small to large scale. In particular, we explain the choice of material properties and boundary conditions. For example, material properties can be defined as isotropic or anisotropic, and boundary conditions can be specified as heat transfer and heat radiation for each boundary side individually. Furthermore, we show how actuators like heating elements can be included in the simulation to steer the heat conduction and we describe briefly how to design the (optimal) control strategy. As Hestia.jl uses the high-class numerical methods of the SciML ecosystem, we also discuss the interaction between both toolkits. Finally, we evaluate the recent state of Hestia.jl and give an outlook on possible future developments.
Key features:
- Temperature-dependent material properties
- Anisotropic heat conduction
- Configuration of actuator and sensor characteristics
Stephan Scholz is a research assistant at the University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten and a doctoral student at the University of Ulm. His research interests include the simulation and control of large-scale physical models like partial differential equations and scientific machine learning.