In terms of the material settings in the thermal simulation:
The heat transfer rate defines whether heat removal by perfusion should be considered. In the absence of this term, heat is only removed by thermal conduction (diffusion) and boundary conditions. The options provided for heat transfer rate affect whether perfusion is constant or affected by local thermoregulation (temperature (T) dependent perfusion, e.g., to account for vasodilation). As for the heat transfer rate, the heat generation rate term can be constant or affected by local thermoregulation (T dependent, reflecting increased metabolic activity with increasing temperature). It is also possible to introduce time-dependent heat generation, e.g., to model a heating battery.
Baseline perfusion values (incl. variability information) are available in the IT'IS database and can be automatically assigned from sim4life: (http://www.itis.ethz.ch/virtual-population/tissue-properties/database/database-summary/).
If non-constant perfusion should be applied or not depends on the tissue and temperature increase magnitude (e.g., muscle above 39 starts to have a strong perfusion increase). The conservativeness of a perfusion model choice is application-dependent.
To simulate the heating effect of tissues over time, blood perfusion and heat generation rate (metabolic heat generation) of the tissue would also need to be considered. The perfusion is covered in the option "Heat Transfer Rate". All options that you can enter here are related to heat-transfer based removal of energy from the system. Perfusion can be adjusted by changing the type of hear transfer (None, Constant, Linear (T), Piecewise Linear (T).
The constant term assumes constant perfusion, independent of tissue temperature. It is the default assigned when using the IT'IS tissue database in Sim4Life. Linear (T) or Piecewise Linear (T) assume temperature dependent perfusion. You can add your your transition temperatures using the little "+" icon. Please note that the linear coefficients represent the slope of the linear perfusion. Each transition temperature indicates the change of the perfusion rate.
