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Fluid and Thermal Modeling for Electronic Design

SINDA/FLUINT has been widely used for thermal modeling of electronics in the aerospace industry for decades. FloCAD® differentiates our product from other network style solvers by expanding the applicability of the code to ground-based electronics with convective environments, liquid cooling, and two-phase cooling loops (including refrigeration, thermosiphons, and immersion cooling). The geometric interface of Thermal Desktop® provides 3D CAD methods for simulating air cooling and thermal behavior of electronic enclosures, PC boards, heat sinks, and electronic racks.

Our suite of tools provides the unique ability to perform integrated thermohydraulic modeling of enclosures, capturing both the thermal and fluid aspects of mass and heat transfer. The user-friendly interface provides the designer the ability to quickly model a system yet provides the flexibility to easily perform sensitivity parametrics, optimization, and other high level operations related to sizing and reliability estimation.

Immersion-cooled Electronics

You have the ability to model fans, pumps, ducts, valves, filters, and other miscellaneous loss elements. Fluids may be selected from the built in property data base or the user may specify his/her own fluid properties. The most common choices for air cooled electronics include dry and moist air (including condensation and other psychometric effects), and for coolant loop fluids choices include water, water-glycol, PAO, 3M's NOVEC® fluids, etc. Even two-phase systems such as vapor compression cycle refrigeration systems can be modeled quickly and reliably.

Highlights of capabilities

  • An inexpensive fast-to-model and fast-to-solve alternative to CFD for air-cooled electronics
  • Fully parametric for easy model changes
  • The only piping network code for coolant loops and heat pipes that lets you lay out 1D lines within 3D thermal/structural geometry
  • Best-of-class design and analysis software for vapor compression refrigeration cycles and other two-phase systems such as spray cooling loops, immersion cooling systems, heat pipes, loop heat pipes, and thermosyphons
  • Best-of-class CAD-based and FEM-compatible thermal radiation, conduction, and contact resistance modeling tools
  • Advanced analysis methods for sizing/optimization, automated model calibration to test data, and statistical design including tolerancing and reliability studies

Sample Model

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