Hello, I'm trying to use the PDE toolbox to perform thermal analysis of a wire inside a trough filled with a material, but I'm having problems with modelling the geometry in MATLAB. In the simplest case, this can be modelled as a cylinder inside of a cuboid which itself sits inside of a larger cuboid.
I have tried importing a model from NX as a .stl file,
model = createpde('thermal','steadystate');
importGeometry(model, 'model.stl');
but I get this error: Failed to create geometry. The stl file is invalid, more than two facets share an edge.
However, I cannot import the geometry as one solid piece because then there would be no inner faces on which to apply the thermal boundary conditions, and no separation between materials to apply different thermal conductivities. And, although I can import the different components (wire, trough, and filling material) separately, I can't find a way to recombine them in MATLAB.
I also tried importing the file using
but I don't know what to do with the data, because I'm not sure exactly what a triangulation is. Can you somehow convert this into a geometry? And if I did, would it preserve the boundaries between materials?
So, because importing the geometry didn't seem to work, I tried making the geometry within MATLAB itself. The only functions I found to do this with were
multicuboid(W, D, H);
multisphere(R);
multicylinder(R, H);
but they seem to be incredibly restricted in function. Take multicuboid(), for example. You can stack cuboids but their width and depth must be equal, and you can place cuboids inside one another but only if their height is equal and their width and depth are different. And, as far as I can tell, you cannot combine the different shapes into a single geometry, and the aforementioned restrictions leave you with very few options. Is there another way to create 3D geometry in MATLAB, or is it simply that basic?
Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
