Calculation of Mass Concrete Temperature Containing Cooling Water Pipe Based on Substructure and Iteration Algorithm

Abstract

Mathematical physics equations are often utilized to describe physical phenomena in various fields of science and engineering. One such equation is the Fourier equation, which is a commonly used and effective method for evaluating the effectiveness of temperature control measures for mass concrete. One important measure for temperature control in mass concrete is the use of cooling water pipes. However, the mismatch of grids between large-scale concrete models and small-scale cooling pipe models can result in a significant waste of calculation time when using the finite element method. Moreover, the temperature of the water in the cooling pipe needs to be iteratively calculated during the thermal transfer process. The substructure method can effectively solve this problem, and it has been validated by scholars. The Abaqus/Python secondary development technology provides engineers with enough flexibility to combine the substructure method with an iteration algorithm, which enables the creation of a parametric modeling calculation for cooling water pipes. This paper proposes such a method, which involves iterating the water pipe boundary and establishing the water pipe unit substructure to numerically simulate the concrete temperature field that contains a cooling water pipe. To verify the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method, two classic numerical examples were analyzed. The results showed that this method has good applicability in cooling pipe calculations. When the value of the iteration parameter α is 0.4, the boundary temperature of the cooling water pipes can meet the accuracy requirements after 4∼5 iterations, effectively improving the computational efficiency. Overall, this approach provides a useful tool for engineers to analyze the temperature control measures accurately and efficiently for mass concrete, such as cooling water pipes, using Abaqus/Python secondary development.

Study on Temperature Control and Cracking Risk of Mass Concrete Sidewalls with a Cooling-Pipe System

“…Kheradmand et al [29] proposed a flexible cooling pipe system, which allows the cooling pipe to be recycled after the concrete hardening to realize the reuse of the cooling pipe. In addition, the numerical simulation method of the cooling pipe system was improved in many studies, which significantly improves the computational efficiency and accuracy of the numerical simulation and provides a method for the optimal design of the cooling system [30][31][32].…”