Overview of Thermal FEA in nTop
*Temperature-dependent thermal conductivity and specific heat
**Beam-based lattices (Graphs) cannot be submitted to Convection or Radiation Boundary Loads (which are necessarily applied to face entities) as it is not possible to select faces in an FE Lattice Mesh. It is therefore necessary to mesh the beam lattices as solid elements in this case.
***For a Nonlinear Thermal Analysis, all FE components must be assigned with nonlinear properties
Note: It is possible to perform an uncoupled Thermal Stress Analysis by taking the result of a Thermal Analysis / Transient Thermal Analysis /Nonlinear Thermal Analysis and using it as a boundary condition in a Static Analysis to obtain the mechanical response of the thermal load due to expansion/contraction. Refer to the lesson on Thermal Stress Analysis.