
Thermal FEA requires definition of a "convection coefficient" to represent heat transfer to surrounding fluid, which is a large potential source of error. This approach is recommended for problems that are dominated by conduction or radiative heat transfer, or where the convection coefficient is well-quantified from physical experiments.
SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation CFD co-simulates the heat transfer and fluid flow - removing any guesswork around convection coefficients. In fact, the convection coefficient can be extracted from a CFD analysis as an output. The meshing technology in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation also makes it ideal for tackling more complex thermal problems. SIMULIA CST Studio Suite is a standalone application with a variety of solvers for electromagnetic (EM), radio frequency (RF), and thermal simulation including CFD. It supports direct ECAD / EDA import, and has true bidirectional coupling between the electromagnetic and thermal solver, allowing analysis of tightly coupled electrical thermal problems.
Presented by Ryan Navarro
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