Softwares for electronic cooling
 

Hello, I have a few knowledge in CFD and I hope I could improve myself thanks to this forum.


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 ?

Which software is better ? which is the easiest to learn or to handle ?

Thank you by advance.

Any general purpose commercial (or commercializable) CFD software will generally be able to also do thermal diffusion. You really only need to watch out for alpha builds, university and private codes, etc. My go-to is Fluent/Star-CCM followed by OpenFOAM. They're all the same from a practical standpoint, it's just a matter of which one you find easiest to learn.