By choosing the Element Properties toggle, located on the application switch for Patran, an Element Properties form will appear. When creating element properties, several option menus are available. The selections made in these option menus will determine which element property form is presented, and ultimately, which Patran Thermal element will be created.

The standard Patran Finite Element methods are used for generating elements in the thermal model. The elements supported by Patran Thermal are detailed in the following subsections. Only linear elements are currently supported by Patran Thermal. These include linear bars, triangles, quadrilaterals, tetrahedrons, wedges, and hexahedrons.

Conductive elements must have a material ID (MID) or material name assigned. This Patran MID number corresponds to a material property template.

Material orientation angle information may be optionally assigned for 2-D and 3-D elements. The material angles are referred to as Axis-1ROT, Axis-2ROT, and Axis-3ROT. These angles may be specified relative to the global system, an alternate coordinate system, or the elemental coordinate system. The material orientation system and angular values are used to transform the orientation of the element material's principal axes system relative to the global X, Y, and Z system. For a rectangular coordinate system, the material's principal axes system is rotated within the specified coordinate frame first about the X, then about the new Y axis after XROT, and finally about the new Z axes by angular values of XROT, YROT, and ZROT degrees. These angles may reference a spatial field. Similarly, in the case of a cylindrical coordinate system the rotations are about R, T, and Z. In referencing a cylindrical coordinate system, the default for an orthotropic material is Kxx along axis-1 (Radial), Kyy along axis-2 (Theta) and Kzz along axis-3 (Z).

Note that 2-D Cartesian elements rotate only about the Z-axis, while 2-D axisymmetric elements rotate about an axis given as the cross product of the R and Z axes. Orthotropic material orientation can be visualized under the Element Properties Show action. Examples of element properties definitions for orthotropic materials orientations are included under the 2-D shell and 3-D solid element properties definition forms.

The Element Property forms are also used to supply element thickness information for 2-D shell elements (bars) and 3-D shell elements (triangles and quadrilaterals), as well as providing Geometric Property (GP) data for convective quadrilateral elements. More specific information is given in the following subsections.

The following pages give an introduction to the Element Properties form, followed by the details of all the element property definitions supported by Patran Thermal.

When Element Properties application is selected on the Patran main form, the form below is displayed. Option menus on this form are used to determine which Patran Thermal element types are to be created and which property forms are to be displayed. The individual property forms are documented later in this section. The full functionality of the Element Properties form is documented in the Patran Reference Manual. See Element Properties Application (Ch. 1) in the Patran Reference Manual.

The following table shows the allowable selections for all option menus for Patran Thermal.

 

The material orientations that will be passed to Patran Thermal can be visualized under Properties Show action.