Autor: hk

Space limitations and high power supply ultimately lead to innovativ cooling design for a wide range of PCB. The arrangement of the power supply’s, heat sink dimensions and design of the outer housing become more important. Thermal simulations within in the design process of PCB help to overcome overheating problems in the later production stage. 

Different materials, the combination of heat conduction, convective and radiative heat transfer within solids and air result in a fairly complex thermal simulation. The setup material properties, boundary conditions, solver settings, coupling regions ofter takes a not small time account.

As example a typical PCB with its components is presented.

Thermal simulation 

Silentdynamics has managed to bundle the simulation setup using OpenFOAM thermal solvers (chtMultiRegionFoam,  chtMultiRegionSimpleFoam) within its framework InsightCAE for a fast preprocessing.

Importing CAD files for each component and its optimized parallel region meshing process using snappyHexMesh are essential for the conservative flux coupling of the different heating regions.

Notice, that the usage of different VIA’s, copper wires, heat conduction layers or other heat related points need to be adressed in simulation model. Using region modeling, cellSet’s and layer defintion for each component all required thermal properties can be considered.

Allowing special defined wildcards, CHT simulation setup is nearly automated. 

Moreover improved heat radiation handling and optimized solver settings are the basis of stable and convergent simulations. 

Space limitations and high cost pressure ultimately lead to hydraulic tanks becoming increasingly complex and smaller. This leads to a dramatic reduction in air separation in the tank – and thus to an increased amount of free air in the hydraulic system.

In hydraulic systems, free air is still a technical challenge today. As long as the air is dissolved in the oil, it does not change its properties.

On the other hand, undissolved air, d. H. Air bubbles, cause:

• Corrosion on pumps and controls
• Reduce the efficiency of pumps and hydraulic motors mincreased compressibility and thus possible stuttering movements of the output member
• Accelerated oil aging
• varnish noise
• Damage to the components (e.g. cavitation)
• etc.

The air gets into the circuit during assembly work, through leaks in the negative pressure area and when the oil flows back into the container. Depending on the separation capacity of the filter-tank system, the air in the tank rises only slowly and is sucked in again by the pump.

Simulation of air-liquid devices

Silentdynamics uses InsightCAE to perform a number of simulations of dispersed gas bubbles in a degassing tank. Application of the solver twoPhaseEulerFoam enables the transient tracking of the gas phase, integral values of air at the outlets and overall the quality of the degassing device. 

As example a simple degassing example is presented . One inlet and two oulets including a wear at the center. Oil-gas mixture move over the wear for degassing.

Setting up gas-oil dispersion boundary conditions as gas bubble size,  blending coefficients,  phaseProperties, etc. the simulation using twoPhaseEulerFoam could be initiated.

Using advanced solver settings within the framework InsightCAE, large time steps are enabled to mangage simulations in a reasonable time.

Isosurfaces of 1% gas are presented. 

Changing of degassing tank geometry using numerical simulation leads to a sufficient degassing process of the hydraulic oil.

When preparing geometry for numerical simulations, it is often required to mark individual surfaces in the model. These surfaces can then be used e.g. as an inlet or forces and pressures can be applied in a structural simulation.

The STEP format supports named entities. The question is: how to set the names in the CAD program? And how to achieve that they are actually stored in the STEP file? In the following, these questions are answered for the software PTC Creo.

Assign Names to Surfaces

Select “File” > “Prepare” and then “Open Model Properties”, then select “Names” in the model properties dialog:

You can then select faces by clicking on them and enter a name in the dialog box:

Exporting Names in STEP File

If export a STP file with the default settings, the names will not be stored in the file. You need to change the export setup for them to be kept.

Open the settings dialog through “File” > “Options”. Then go to “Configuration Editor”. Here, you need to add the option “intf_out_assign_names” and set it to “user_name”.

Accessing the Named Entity in ISCAD

It is now possible to access the faces through the assigned names, e.g. in ISCAD. Once the STEP file is imported, its sub-entities can be explored by typing Ctrl-I (see below). The named faces appear as “face_<NAME>” int the hierarchy:

FreeShip software is a convenient tool for designing hulls.
The capabilities of FreeShip are essentially limited to the design of the fuselage exterior. For everything else, a real CAD system is required. There is an IGES export function for the transfer.
There is also a successor: DelftShip. The IGES export function has been removed from the free version of DelftShip and is only available in the commercial version. This is not available to me, so I cannot test it.
I would like to use the geometry in our tool ISCAD. It is based on OpenCASCADE.
The hull geometry modeled in FreeShip 2.6 looks like this:
The export to an IGES file is unspectacular and 40 individual faces are created.
The next step is the import into OpenCASCADE. But there is a problem here. OpenCASCADE (v7.2.0) reports:

Report : 40 unknown entities.

Total number of loaded entities 41.

Nothing is displayed. Although it is reported that an import works with earlier versions (https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?t=1670), the import does not work with the current OCC version, nor with different older versions of Salome (and OpenCASCADE). On the other hand, the import works e.g. in the commercial CAD software Creo.

Finally, a study shows that the file exported by FreeShip contains only entities of type 128 (spline surface). In addition, there is a single color definition at the beginning. At the end of the parameter block of a 128 surface (see e.g. https://wiki.eclipse.org/IGES_file_Specification#Rational_B-Spline_Surface_.28Type_128.29) are the start and end parameters (min/max U and V values) of the surface. These entries are omitted by FreeShip and for OpenCASCADE this is an error.

One workaround is to patch the IGES import of OpenCASCADE. The corresponding code is located from line 188 in the file IGESGeom/IGESGeom_ToolBSplineSurface.cxx. I removed the error message and inserted default parameter limits:

  if (!PR.ReadReal(PR.Current(), aUmin) || !PR.ReadReal(PR.Current(), aVmin)){
    //Message_Msg Msg106("XSTEP_106");
    //PR.SendFail(Msg106);
    aUmin=0.0;
    aVmin=0.0;
  }

  if (!PR.ReadReal(PR.Current(), aUmax) || !PR.ReadReal(PR.Current(), aVmax)){
    //Message_Msg Msg107("XSTEP_107");
    //PR.SendFail(Msg107);
    aUmax=1.0;
    aVmax=1.0;
  }

With these modifications, the import works: