Hi all, never seen this community before and I was directed this way for some advice. 

I'm a PhD student at the university of Manchester, and a lot of my work involves using Abaqus to simulate a NewTec test rig that we have. Is this the right place to post for some guidance on setting up my simulations correctly? 

What I'm trying to do is simulate the temperature a tensile specimen gets to during a tensile test - although my model is not currently doing thermomechanical testing, just the thermal part. The set up involves 2 furnaces free in space in relatively poor contact with a tensile sample (shown as the circles at 300C in red below). The gauge has a resultant temperature drop, and for tensile testing knowing that temperature is key to understanding the results that we get out. I couldn't find much help online for multi-part simulation, so used this type of set up that someone has used for modelling conduction in double glazing. Link: Heat transfer through composite materials. The set up I have is shown below. To account for poor contact with the furnaces I've added in a thin layer of material with poor thermal conductivity on the top of them, but is there a way to do this more accurately? 

How would you do it? What sort of contacts/boundary conditions/interactions should I be using? 

I'm adding in some more parts to account for additional losses (thermocouples, chucks for the tensile test etc). I'm happy to send across the model if that helps! I'm currently calibrating some values against experimental results and should be running an experiment with a thermal camera in the coming month to get the right gradient. The main value I'm missing is the temperature on the top of the sample (teal coloured), but I should have that soon. 

Any help would be great, or even directing me to a file of a similar type of heat transfer simulation somewhere. If I don't respond on here feel free to drop me an email at thomas.hughes@manchester.ac.uk. 

Cheers! 

Tom.