Impact of Varying Fidelity Conjugate Heat Transfer Models on Propulsion-Relevant Cooling Channel Performance

Thermal, heat transfer, and pressure drop performances were computationally evaluated in a canonical actively-cooled combustion chamber wall geometry containing a through-hole sensor port interface for applications to in-situ measurements of additively manufactured propulsion devices. Conjugate heat transfer (CHT) simulations, performed with SolidWorks Flow Simulation 2026 and ANSYS Fluent 2023 R2, were used to investigate trade-offs between industrial workflow speed and high-CPU-cost accuracy when considering the effects of coolant wall interactions at liquid regimes. SolidWorks automatically generates a mesh before starting the simulation while ANSYS requires the mesh to be generated before the simulation set up phase. Four meshes were produced with ANSYS in an attempt to take advantage of the available meshing methods. These meshes were unstructured, unstructured with inflation layers, structured, and structured with inflation layers. The unstructured meshes were produced quickly as they utilized the default meshing parameters. The structured meshes took many iterations and hours of work and computational time to produce usable meshes. SolidWorks simulations converged after about 250 iterations while all ANSYS simulations converged in 41 iterations or less. All simulations produced usable data with comparable results in good agreement. While ANSYS is well established and has more robust models, the ease of use of SolidWorks makes it an attractive choice for beginners and quick simulations.