Mentor Blogs

By way of an apology for the more verbose blogs I’ve been issuing recently I’d like to present you with a blog that serves no other purpose than to show a pretty picture. CFD as an acronym has quite a few different interpretations. Contracts for Difference if you’re into your financials. Colour For Directors if you’re in marketing. Cheats, Frauds and Deceivers if you’re … Read More

Electronics Cooling, CFD

Electronics cooling simulation was born out of the world of CFD, rather fully conjugate heat transfer simulation where convective, radiative and conductive affects are considered concurrently. Back in the day much talk was had about turbulence modelling, convective discretisation schemes and linear equation solvers, all typical CFD subjects but somewhat out of place in the context of what became the … Read More

CTM, Electronics Cooling, CFD, T3ster

You all know what a chatterbox I can be when I’m excited about something. So believe you me when I say the past few months have been excruciatingly hard for me. I’ve been sitting on some pretty big news and I’ve been itching to tell the world all about it.  Now that the cat is officially out of the bag, there’s no holding me back… FloTHERM XT as the enabling technology in the EDA/MDA design flow. The … Read More

Design Engineer, FloEFD, CFD, Thermal, FloTHERM XT

Hello Everyone This is a bit of a follow up to my previous blog about the FloVENT analysis of the Mentor Graphics Data Centers in Wilsonville, OR and Shannon, Ireland.  http://www.mentor.com/products/mechanical/blog/post/mentor-graphics-data-center-design-using-cfd-modeling-fc6dbfc3-ec40-431a-8628-67375c2e946a Well the one in Shannon, Ireland has been online for a while now, and our Wilsonville, … Read More

CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics, ASME, Plano, Texas, Dallas, Data Center

Hello Everybody   Previously, I co-authored a semitherm paper on the use of our HVAC CFD tool, FloVENT, on the design of a Mentor Graphics data center.  Recently I have seen this topic republished in the data center journal with the title “EDA Vendor takes its Own Advice on Data Center Design”.  I find this topic interesting, so I thought I’d blog about this and break from my typical … Read More

Raised Floor, Rack, Semitherm, CFD, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Cabinet, HVAC, Mentor Graphics, Data Center, FloVENT

I’ve never really been a fan of the color pink. If you look thru my childhood pictures you’ll find me wearing pink clothes (chosen by my lovely mom) but in every one of those pictures you also find my head slightly dipped down, defiantly looking into the camera and pouting. Not a happy bunny. As soon as I was old enough to make my own decisions regarding clothes, pink was banished from my wardrobe. … Read More

CFD, ROI, CAD-Embedded

I put the title in quotes as it’s the title of a blog post by John Chawner at Pointwise who keeps a pleasantly vendor neutral(ish) blog about all things CFD called ‘Another Fine Mesh’, including the excellent weekly ‘This Week in CFD’ that is becoming a bit of a mecca for the CFD community. John’s blog focusses on a white paper Mentor issued recently about How to … Read More

Electronics Cooling, FloEFD, CFD, FloVENT

Saturday lulled me into a false sense of security. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and for once in a long time I wasn’t out hiking.  I thought that’s fine… there’s always tomorrow. Then bam on Sunday the rain came … the monsoon kind of rain. It reminded me of a quick conversation I had with a German friend of mine over the summer.  He quipped that if rain were an Olympic event, GB would win Gold, … Read More

profitability, ROI, CFD

I live in a 3D world –3D simulation that is.  I remember when my work life went from 2D to 3D. I used to sit in a cubicle across from a software developer who specialized in graphics. He was a pesky lad. Whenever he’d get stuck on a particularly difficult piece of code he would throw missiles of all kinds at me – anything from crumpled pieces of paper to rubber bands and paper clips. I don’t know why … Read More

Design Engineer, FloEFD, CFD, Flowmaster, ROI

Effective use of a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation tool requires at least a working knowledge of fluid dynamics itself. Tools alone don’t make for a good engineer. When interviewing for jobs within the Mechanical Analysis Division (and way back into Flomerics days too) a common question posed to tease out such an understanding is to describe the air flow patterns in and around a … Read More

FloVENT, HVAC, CFD

I don’t know about you but last Saturday night I decided to stay in – I was only halfway done with my weekend but I was exhausted. The day before I had taken a vacation day and driven down to Weymouth to watch Olympic sailing and got up super early to drive back to London to do an 8-mile hike in Surrey. So the thought of going anywhere or doing anything too taxing was out of the question (especially … Read More

CFD, Airflow

When I watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, I knew I needed to analyze something related to the Olympics during this special time of year.  At first I thought I would analyze the Olympic Rings.  Not a real scientific CFD analysis, but just something cool and easy to do, by hollowing out some Olympic CAD rings and putting some flow through.  Well, using FloEFD to do this analysis was easy, … Read More

Shuttlecock, Olympics, Badminton, Birdie, aerodynamics, Creo, FloEFD, CFD, Compuational Fluid Dynamics

Hi. You may have been wondering why I’ve been so quiet lately. Quite frankly I’ve been busy. Busy at work and busy during my downtime (which is when I do most of my thinking and writing for this blog). This has been a tremendous summer for those of us who are in London. First we celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Then came the Olympics. Yes I stood in the cold and monsoon rain for … Read More

aerodynamics, wind tunnel test, CFD

Conventional wisdom has it that the best place to put a radiator in a room is under the window. However, there’s nothing conventional about wisdom and one should be obliged to question and verify those facts that we take for granted. CFD and its ability to predict air flow and heat transfer offers an unrivalled efficient method to study such applications. Using the concept of PPD (percentage people … Read More

FloVENT, HVAC, CFD, radiator, thermal comfort

Sometime between 40 and 100 thousand years ago humans started to wear clothes, an estimate as accurate as you’d expect for something that wasn’t documented at the time. Earliest estimate of  humans documenting language are a mere 5000 years ago. One can only assume that it wasn’t modesty or fashion that drove the adoption of clothing, but comfort. Much of what we still do today, frequently … Read More

thermal comfort, Fanger, FloVENT, CFD, PPD, radiator, HVAC, PMV