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Mechanical CAD interface takes heat off engineers



Surrey-based thermal analysis package vendor Flomerics has released a mechanical CAD interface for its Flotherm analysis software.To get more news about mechanical cad drawings, you can visit shine news official website.
Flotherm uses finite element techniques to calculate temperatures, heat-flows and airflows within electronic equipment and PCBs.
Although calculation is automatic with Flotherm, generating a representative model for the analysis is not.
Now Flomerics has released Flo/MCAD which takes standard mechanical CAD (MCAD) data and gives mechanical engineers a flying start in developing a suitable model.
Half the battle of converting a CAD representation into a model suitable for thermal analysis is data shedding. “I doubt there is a computer anywhere that could perform thermal analysis in a reasonable time on all the data that is available in an MCAD design,” said Dr. Michael Reynell, director of marketing at Flomerics. An MCAD design before conversion with a thermal plot from Flomerics’ Flotherm package. An MCAD design after conversion with a thermal plot from Flomerics’ Flotherm package.
Flo/MCAD helps the engineer to simplify a design, removing data that in not relevant to thermal analysis and so reduce the amount of data that must be processed. “The size of the data file will typically be reduced by an order of magnitude” said Reynell, “Thermally irrelevant features like blends, fillets and non planar surfaces are removed under full user control.” The package also allows the engineer to add thermal parameters to the design’s components and has a library for commonly used materials such as aluminium and printed circuit board.
The new software is aimed at engineers with a working knowledge of thermal design. It does not fully automate the simplification but, according to Reynell: “It interactively produces a thermal equivalent model in a very short space of time.” Flomerics has also introduced Flomotion, an animation tool to aid the visualisation of thermal flow.