Space limitations and high power supply requirements ultimately lead to innovative cooling designs for a wide range of PCBs. The arrangement of the power supply, heatsink dimensions, and the design of the outer housing become more important. Thermal simulations within the PCB design process help to overcome overheating problems in later production stages. 

Different materials, the combination of heat conduction, convective, and radiative heat transfer within solids and air result in fairly complex thermal simulations. Setting up material properties, boundary conditions, solver settings, and coupling regions often takes a considerable amount of time.

As an example, a typical PCB with its components is presented.

Simulación térmica 

Silentdynamics has managed to bundle the simulation setup using OpenFOAM thermal solverschtMultiRegionFoam,  chtMultiRegionSimpleFoamwithin its framework InsightCAE for 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 Vias, copper wires, heat conduction layers, or other heat-related points needs to be addressed in the simulation model. Using region modeling, cell sets, and layer definitions for each component allows for the consideration of all required thermal properties.

Allowing for specially defined wildcards, CHT simulation setup is nearly automated. 

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