in a recent article on ee times europe, ajay b. harish, a technical writer at simscale and doctoral candidate at the institute of continuum mechanics in hannover, germany, praised the creation of online engineering simulation software (computer-aided engineering or cae) and its impact on making thermal management easier for engineers during the design phase.

thermal management simulations have found a home online. (wikimedia commons)

harish wrote, “it is indeed true that experimentation cannot be totally eliminated, but the purpose of simulation technology is to complement it, contributing to parameter optimization that can lead to improved products, significantly more energy efficient. the era when fem and cfd were independent entities is long gone and multidisciplinary optimization is the reality realm.”

as miniaturization of components in electronics and the overwhelming growth of server farms and data centers continue, the need for thermal management is also rising.  harish believes that this new wave of browser-based simulations offer benefits even to smaller companies that could not previously afford to allocate resources to that type of tool.

“the entire process of thermal management is complicated,” said harish. “thus, it is imperative to break down the entire process into sub-processes to incorporate cae modeling.”

he promotes the simscale cloud-based software that, he said, works 100 percent in the browser and makes it easier for parallel computing. he added, “the conjugate heat transfer and thermal - structural analysis options allow transient coupled solutions accounting for physical and boundary nonlinearities like contact or plasticity.” it also offers the capability of joining an online forum of engineers to learn how to use the product correctly.

in the december issue of electronics cooling magazine, in an article that starts with “7 years of college down the drain…” (which is a quote from the movie animal house), ross wilcoxon posits a different idea about simulations.

he writes that simulations can only be one part of the thermal management evaluation in the design phase and that engineers need to refocus on the basic heat transfer calculations that they learned in school.

“thanks to the availability of powerful analysis software, a lot of people have had the luxury of forgetting, or at least ignoring, their hard-won thermal management education,” wilcoxon wrote.

he added, “in the vast majority of cases, the analysts and the software perform extremely well. but it only takes one outlier in the distribution of analysis results to create some problems.”

this viewpoint was echoed by vineet barot, a field application engineer at advanced thermal solutions, inc., as he was discussing his work on a recent project. barot said, “cfd, because it’s so easy to use, can be a tool that will lead you astray if you don’t check it because it’s very easy to use and the software can’t tell you if your results are accurate…we use cfd too but we want to make sure that it’s on the right path.”