Learning Forum

[peteroznewman]

Mesh the water-ice volume with solid elements and create a water-ice material with an artificial Isotropic Coefficient of Thermal Expansion.  The artifical value of CTE would be set so that a 1 C temperature increase causes the desired linear thermal expansion that occurs when water turns to ice.

Set the Environment temperature to 0 C.  Apply a Thermal Condition to the water-ice solid body of a 1 C temperature. You could use a negative sign on the water-ice CTE and have a -1 C temperature to get the exact same expansion effect. Set the CTE of the container material to 0 so that the container does not experience thermal expansion, though this won’t happen if you don’t assign the Thermal condition to the container body.

This method works when you don’t need to have accurate temperatures in the model for other reasons.

The water-ice material needs a Young’s modulus that is equal to ice of about 9 GPa so that as the container goes into tension, the ice is put into compression and you get some strain in both the ice and the container wall.

The volumetric expansion of water to ice is about 9% but you have to convert that to a linear expansion value to define the CTE in Ansys. The simple way to do that is to take the cube root so the value of CTE would be 0.002914, though there are other equations.