12.2.3 Specific heat

Products: ABAQUS/Standard ABAQUS/Explicit ABAQUS/CAE

References

Overview

A material's specific heat:

is required for transient “Uncoupled heat transfer analysis,” Section 6.5.2; transient “Fully coupled thermal-stress analysis,” Section 6.5.4; transient “Coupled thermal-electrical analysis,” Section 6.6.2; and “Adiabatic analysis,” Section 6.5.5;
must appear in conjunction with a density definition (see “Density,” Section 9.2.1);
can be linear or nonlinear (by defining it as a function of temperature); and
can be specified as a function of temperature and/or field variables.

Defining specific heat

The specific heat of a material is defined as

where

is the internal energy due to thermal effects only. The specific heat per unit mass is given as a function of temperature and field variables. When possible, large changes in internal energy during a phase change should be modeled using “Latent heat,” Section 12.2.4, not specific heat.

Input File Usage:

*SPECIFIC HEAT

ABAQUS/CAE Usage:

Property module: material editor: ThermalSpecific Heat

Elements

Specific heat effects can be defined for all heat transfer, coupled temperature-displacement, and coupled thermal-electrical elements in ABAQUS. Specific heat can also be defined for stress/displacement elements for use in adiabatic stress analysis.