Over the past 15 years, the industry standard tool for thermal analysis, SINDA, has been expanded to include advanced thermodynamic and hydrodynamic solutions (“FLUINT”). With the recent culmination of the unique modeling tools that are described in this paper, and with concurrent expansions described elsewhere (Ref 1), SINDA/ FLUINT has arguably become the most complete generalpurpose thermohydraulic network analyzer that is available.

Recent years have witnessed more improvement to the SINDA/FLUINT thermohydraulic analyzer than at any other time in its long history. These improvements have included not only expansions in analytic power, but also the additions of high-level modules that offer revolutions in thermal/ fluid engineering itself.

The NASA standard tool for thermohydraulic analysis, SINDA/FLUINT, includes thermodynamic and hydrodynamic solutions specifically targeted at the growing demand for design and analysis of liquid propulsion systems. Applications in this field have included:

This paper describes the application of the general purpose SINDA/FLUINT thermohydraulic analyzer to the modeling of vapor compression (VC) cycles such as those commonly used in automotive climate control and building HVAC systems. The software is able to simulate transient operation of vapor compression cycles, predicting pressures, coefficients of performance, and condenser/evaporator liquid positions in a closed two-phase system with a fixed fluid charge.