[RoPr]

Hello, dear visitors of the forum. Please excuse me if any questions are not specific enough or are too complex. Please help the novice user to understand the optimal way of mastering and carrying out the transient thermal calculation of the vacuum furnace resistance for melting and crystallization of silicon (with the help of OpenFOAM platform and/or maybe some other more convenient free programs). ANSYS is too expensive for us. The OpenFOAM tutorials describe very simple tasks. In my case, the task is multiphysical: Joule heating, as a consequence of setting the potential difference on the contact surfaces of the heater, in the heat transfer through solids, radiant heat exchange through vacuum and natural convection in the liquid phase with silicon (purpose: to search for a scheme of graphite heater sawing, which will provide through convection in the silicon melt (such as cavity) due to the azimuthal inhomogeneity of the heater's thermal field and the side wall of the crucible with melt). Will the numerical capabilities of OpenFOAM allow to regulate the electric power of the heater to maintain a given temperature at a certain control point with high accuracy (for example, T=1412 +/- 10 K)? Is the chtMultiRegionFoam solver sufficient for all the above processes? How do you build a grid if the geometry represents an assembly of several adjacent bodies with different thermal properties? How to build a grid in the space between the bodies, i.e. in the areas of exclusively radiant heat exchange? Is it all possible in SALOME and OpenFOAM? Are these programs suitable for an engineering task of this level of complexity (typical and common in my opinion)? The attached file shows a vertical section of my geometry.