Mechanical Analysis Blog

I thought I’d put up a brief post about an exciting series of free web seminars that address key engineering challenges in product design. The first of these is a seminar aimed at engineering managers to explain how their mechanical designers can perform a CFD Analysis without leaving the familiar comfort of their MCAD tool. Web Seminar: CFD Analysis for MCAD Designers - Better Products, Faster Historically … Read More

CFD History, Design Process, CFD, Mesh Generation, Meshing, FloEFD, Fluid Dynamics

When we started in electronics cooling, electronics products were built out of objects that were almost entirely Cartesian, so a Cartesian mesh made perfect sense - and still does in many cases. One of the inherent issues in CFD is mesh associated error. One source of error arises from the mesh being too coarse to capture the gradients of temperature, pressure, velocity etc. When I started in CFD I … Read More

Electronics Cooling, Mesh Generation, CFD, Meshing

Electronics products are built from lots of components, PCBs, etc. which are themselves quite complex. A single IC package can be made of more than half a dozen or so different materials. They also tend to be ‘cluttered’ with the number of individual objects running into the hundreds, and miniaturization is only making this worse. Things tend to get changed and moved around a lot as the design progresses. … Read More

Electronics Cooling, Mesh Generation, CFD, Cluttered Geometry, Wall Functions, Meshing, Boundary Conditions

To many professional analysts with a background in Computational Fluid Dynamics, most electronics cooling applications look pretty straightforward. There aren’t any complex physical processes to model like combustion (well hopefully not), high pressures or high temperatures (again, hopefully not) or high speed flow. Typically there are no free surfaces or multiphase flows, and no moving geometry. So, … Read More

Electronics Cooling, Design Process, CFD, Mesh Generation, Meshing