Optimizing heat transfer and controlling temperatures is a critical design engineering issue for many industry applications, including heat exchangers, thermal mixing valves, exhaust manifolds and electronic devices. Accurate prediction of the temperature in both the fluid and solid components is essential to accurately predict the thermal performance of a product design. By performing upfront thermal simulation, design engineers are able to accelerate product designs, mitigate late stage design changes and reduce physical prototypes. ANSYS AIM is an easy-to-use simulation environment designed for all engineers to rapidly and confidently evaluate product performance well before design decisions are locked-in. ANSYS AIM 17.2 includes many new features for upfront thermal simulation.
New Capabilities for Conjugate Heat Transfer
AIM 17.2 includes several new features that build upon its existing thermal design capabilities. Volumetric momentum and heat sources are now available for both fluid and conjugate heat transfer analysis. Momentum sources allow the modeling of fluid momentum gain or loss in the flow volume. This can be used to approximate the behaviors of components such as fans and filters. The new volumetric heat sources enable the modeling of heat sources or sinks in either a fluid or a solid domain, which, for example, can be used to model heat generation resulting from the power loss in an electronic package. Momentum and heat sources both can be specified as constant values, or by using a position-dependent expression for even greater flexibility and accuracy.
New Thermal Transient Capabilities
ANSYS AIM 17.2 enhances existing solid thermal capabilities to simulate time-dependent behaviors. This allows design engineers to determine how temperature and heat flux vary over time. Many industry applications, including electronic components, engines and piping systems, involve a time-dependent thermal response. AIM now supports transient thermal conditions including temperature, heat flow, heat flux, convection and radiation, which can all be defined using expressions or tabular data to accurately define time-dependent thermal conditions. Ohmic losses from a magnetostatic solution can also be applied as a heat load as part of a thermal transient simulation using multiphysics coupling.
Heat sink design for time transient thermal loading
What’s Coming Next?
As part of our frequent release program, the thermal design capabilities of AIM will continue to be extended with each point release. For example, thermal effects due to eddy currents and transient conjugate heat transfer capabilities will soon be available.
Interested in Learning More?
Combined, these new features and more improve the speed and fidelity of upfront simulation for thermal design. You can learn more about how to set up a basic thermal conjugate heat transfer simulation in AIM by viewing the video below.
Or, if you want to experience ANSYS AIM first hand, visit AIM Try it Now to test drive the industry’s easiest simulation environment with several step-by-step demonstration models.
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