Product Overview

Thermal engineers can’t focus on temperature gradients within a single part. Yes, such gradients are often generated for structural thermo-elastic studies, but producing the right temperatures requires paying attention to how that part was mounted, what transient environments it sees, and so forth. Producing the right temperatures often requires a thermal/fluid model of a high-level assembly … often an entire vehicle or product … since energy doesn’t stop flowing at part boundaries.

Here are common thermal engineering Nightmares of Years Past:

• Having to use structural meshes. They are focused on stress risers in a threaded bolt hole, yet oblivious to the way the bracket mounts to the sleeve. They’re way too detailed for system-level studies, especially when you add convection or radiation. And you don’t need to have a thermal node at each structural mesh vertex even if you do need to accurately predict the temperature at those vertices, thanks to standard Thermal Desktop mesh mapping methods.
• Being given a CAD part or assembly file when you don’t own that CAD system, or can’t remember how to use it if you do own it.
• Being given a STEP or IGES file. It is like someone poured a bucket of ball bearings on your desk and said it was the same mass as a bowling ball.
• Being given a CAD file period. Let’s face it, they were meant for design documentation, and not for analysis, much less thermal analysis. They have to be re-purposed.

But the Number One Nightmare was this:

• Having to do it all over again when a dimension changes, or a part moves, or when you receive an updated CAD file.

CRTech SpaceClaim has eliminated most of these Nightmares. But when you add Mesh Generation for SpaceClaim, the rest of them go away as well.

How is that possible?

First, you can generate a very coarse mesh if need be, even skipping details that you didn’t bother to eliminate using SpaceClaim.

But it is mostly possible to avoid repetitious tasks because you aren’t just generating a mesh, you are describing what to do with that mesh … and with any thermal nodes and elements that result when the object is meshed.

You can explain to the program that the bottom of a battery sleeve should be available for thermal contact, for example. Whatever elements are subsequently generated will be automatically included in the contact conductance you have set up.

In a nutshell, you aren’t just sending the geometry or the mesh to Thermal Desktop, you are telling the program what to do with it: what it means thermally in your master model.

And that means that if a dimension changes, or if you decide you need a different mesh type or density in some region, everything else is retained and ready to run: material and insulation definitions are preserved, and designated zones are ready to reconnect with the rest. It even remembers Thermal Desktop editing operations that will be automatically re-applied to whatever nodes and elements result after the SpaceClaim and Thermal Desktop models are re-synchronized.

Additional Information

• For an overview demonstration, click here
• For more details, click here

Features

Meshing

• Advanced thermal finite elements for faster solving models
• Triangular and quadrilateral surface elements
• Tetrahedral and pyramid solid elements
• Global and local customizations of both mesh density and type
• Non-manifold (hybrid 2D/3D) meshes
• Advanced thermal modeling features for any contacting geometry
• Matched meshes accelerate and improve calculations for contact or bonding
• Merged meshes eliminate the need to align nodes and perform merging operations later when modeling continuous pieces or welded/brazed joints
• Control the priority of merged objects (e.g., “insulate the plate, except for any region where this box sets on top of that plate”)

SpaceClaim Integration

• Supports hierarchical parts and assemblies
• Thermal Model preparation
• Designate thermal modeling information on portions of the geometry (e.g., certain surfaces or solid bodies)
• Name thermophysical or optical properties, insulation, thickness, active sides for radiation analysis groups, SINDA submodel assignments, contact or heater zones, convection regions, etc.

Thermal Desktop Integration

• Creates active links between a Thermal Desktop drawing and multiple SpaceClaim design documents
  • Link geometry, a mesh of some or all of that geometry, and other thermal modeling data (e.g., contact zones, submodels, insulation, etc.)
  • Establish parametric links between Thermal Desktop symbols and SpaceClaim driving dimensions
• One-button update of a complete thermal/fluid model if either the mesh or the geometry changes
  • Thermal Desktop Tag Sets are automatically generated and updated
  • Post-mesh editing operations (such as changing node type or setting initial conditions) are saved as scripts for automated updates