Heating models

Heating models#

The heating model is responsible for describing the various terms in the energy equation (3), using the coefficients provided by the material model. These can be source terms such as radiogenic heat production or shear heating, they can be terms on the left-hand side of the equation, such as part of the latent heating terms, or they can be heating processes related to reactions. Each of these terms is described by a “heating model,” and a simulation can have none, one, or many heating models that are active throughout a simulation, with each heating model usually only implementing the terms for one specific heating process. One can then decide in the input file which heating processes should be included in the computation by providing a list of heating models in the input file.

When the equations are assembled and solved, the heating terms from all heating models used in the computation are added up.

To implement a new heating model, you need to overload the aspect::HeatingModel::Interface class and use the ASPECT_REGISTER_HEATING_MODEL macro to register your new class. The implementation of the new class should be in namespace aspect::HeatingModel.

Specifically, your new class needs to implement the following basic interface:

template <int dim>
    class aspect::HeatingModel::Interface
    {
      public:
        // compute heating terms used in the energy equation
        virtual
        void
        evaluate (const MaterialModel::MaterialModelInputs<dim> &material_model_inputs,
                  const MaterialModel::MaterialModelOutputs<dim> &material_model_outputs,
                  HeatingModel::HeatingModelOutputs &heating_model_outputs) const;

        // All the following functions are optional:
        virtual
        void
        initialize ();

        virtual
        void
        update ();

        // Functions used in dealing with run-time parameters
        static
        void
        declare_parameters (ParameterHandler &prm);

        virtual
        void
        parse_parameters (ParameterHandler &prm);

        // Allow the heating model to attach additional material model outputs in case it needs
        // them to compute the heating terms
        virtual
        void
        create_additional_material_model_outputs(MaterialModel::MaterialModelOutputs<dim> &) const;
    };

The main properties of the material are computed in the function evaluate() that takes references to MaterialModelInputs and MaterialModelOutputs objects and is supposed to fill the HeatingModelOutputs structure. As in the material model, this function is handling lookups at an arbitrary number of positions, so for each heating term (for example the heating source terms), a std::vector is returned. The following members of HeatingModelOutputs need to be filled:

struct HeatingModelOutputs
{
       std::vector<double> heating_source_terms;
       std::vector<double> lhs_latent_heat_terms;

       // optional:
       std::vector<double> rates_of_temperature_change;
}

Heating source terms are terms on the right-hand side of the equations, such as the adiabatic heating \(\alpha T \left( \mathbf u \cdot \nabla p \right)\) in equation (3). An example for a left-hand side heating term is the temperature-derivative term \(\rho T \Delta S \frac{\partial X}{\partial T}\) that is part of latent heat production (see equation (5)).[1] Rates of temperature change[2] are used when the heating term is related to a reaction process, happening on a faster time scale than the temperature advection. All of these terms can depend on any of the material model inputs or outputs. Implementations of evaluate() may of course choose to ignore dependencies on any of these arguments.

The remaining functions are used in postprocessing as well as handling run-time parameters. The exact meaning of these member functions is documented in the aspect::HeatingModel::Interface class documentation. Note that some of the functions listed above have a default implementation, as discussed on the documentation page just mentioned.

Just like for material models, the functions initialize() and update() can be implemented if desired (the default implementation does nothing) and are useful if the heating model has an internal state. The function initialize() is called once during the initialization of ASPECT and can be used to allocate memory for the heating model, initialize state, or read information from an external file. The function update() is called at the beginning of every time step.