We are modelling the heating of three parts in a furnace with ANSYS Workbench 17.1:
Since all bodies exchange heat through radiation with one another, should all surfaces have the same enclosure number?
I am not sure if ANSYS can evaluate view factors and determine whether two surfaces can see each other or not.
Any help / advice on this matter would be really appreciated.
From what I understand of your problem and according to the manual, then yes, you should attribute the same enclosure number to all surfaces which belong to a same enclosure. For complex enclosures, some surfaces may not see each other even though they are in the same enclosure. I'm not entirely sure how Ansys Mechanical deals with this and hence whether it is still sound to use such a model for such problems. ANSYS Fluent can deal the problem correctly for such situations.
Also, note that it is possible to tell Ansys that two surfaces belong to the same enclosure even when they are obviously not! (You will not get a question mark requesting for correction as when you use twice a surface for two distinct radiation BC). So it's the responsability of the modeler to check for that.
Hope that helps a bit.