Softwares for electronic cooling

Questions and remarks about code_saturne usage
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Malakian
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Apr 20, 2022 3:38 am

Softwares for electronic cooling

Post by Malakian »

Hello, I have a few knowledge in CFD and hope to improve myself.

I live in France.

I am a mechanical engineer and I used to deal with strength of materials and Finite Elements Analysis.

But in my company, one recently asked me to deal with a new field : Fluid mechanics and thermal issues.
To be more precise, I have to solve electronic cooling issues. In other words, cooling PCB with power components with fluids and/or thermal diffusion (in solid).

So I am looking for a software that can handle these two sorts of problems : fluid mechanics and thermal diffusion.

But I don't know what software can do that except commercial softwares like Ansys.

I've been heard about OpenFoam and Code_Saturne.

Can someone here give me some advice about that ?

Is Code_Saturne appropriate ?

If no, which software is better ? which is the easiest to learn or to handle ?

Thank you by advance.
Yvan Fournier
Posts: 4070
Joined: Mon Feb 20, 2012 3:25 pm

Re: Softwares for electronic cooling

Post by Yvan Fournier »

Hello,

Yes, code_saturne should be appropriate, as long as the flow can be considered Newtonian, or quasi-Newtonian (which might or might not be in microfluidics). So if your components are not microscopic, that should be fine.

You will need a separate tool to build meshes, and for that, the salome platform (https://www.salome-platform.org/?lang=fr) should be useful, unless you are already familiar with other tools from you finite element background in which case you need to check whether their output format is compatible with code_saturne, or convertible through another tool. Supported formats are listed here : https://www.code-saturne.org/documentat ... rmats.html.

Note also that regarding meshes, hexahedral elements are usually preferable to tetrahedral elements (in terms of quality and computational cost).

Best regards,

Yvan
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