What is the best electronics cooling package?

Alan

I have used both Flotherm and Icepak in depth for modelling set top boxes. Neither package is up to the job as far as I am concerned. In as much as I spend days/weeks re-optimising the mesh for max cell quality and min cell count. At at the end you only have a "leggo" version of the real geometry as neither package handles complex curves. My models are between 1 to 2 million cells even after carefule non-conformal meshing. I am not modeling a small smpsu or or a card rack with lots of air space but a fairly large electronics box (+ domain of double the box volume) with a lot of closely packed and detailed objects.

I found the Fluent 3 day training course used "noddy" examples compared to my own work leaving me un prepared for real life.

It seems to me F.V.A is ok for a model with simple rectangular mild steel case but no good for complex plastic geometry enclosures with air flow constricted by components hard drive, extruded heatsinks RF screening cans etc all within a few mm of one another. Avoiding thermal boundary issues become nightmare.

I typically have a time slot of about two weeks before MCAD sets everyting in concrete and hardware development becomes cut and try! Icepak has just two support engineers to serve the whole of Europe and as they are also holding training sessions one is often "up a creek without a paddle" waiting for help.

While Icepak has a lot more mesh controls and three types of mesh and an intelligent ECAD import filter it is actually far more "finnicky" to use than simple old cartesian Flotherm.

Having got all that off my chest;

Any advice out there folks?