Mentor Graphics announces FloEFD for electronics cooling simulation
The FloEFD suite tightly integrates with MCAD design tools to enable mechanical designers to analyze sophisticated electronic products, including those with complex geometries.
-- EDN, March 17, 2009
Mentor Graphics has announced the FloEFD (Engineering Fluid Dynamics) v9.0 product suite from the company’s mechanical analysis division (formerly known as Flomerics). FloEFD v9.0 offers functionality specifically targeted for simulation and analysis of electronics cooling applications. The FloEFD suite tightly integrates with MCAD design tools to enable mechanical designers to analyze sophisticated electronic products, including those with complex geometries.
The FloEFD suite now complements Mentor’s FloTHERM product line to cover analysis by both the mechanical designer as well as the thermal-analysis specialist. With FloEFD, the simulation models are easily and directly generated from a design database while in the MCAD environment.
“This new generation of CAD-embedded tools saves us money and time by enabling design engineers to optimize the design from a thermal standpoint early in the design process,” stated James Young, an Azonix Corp design engineer. “Mentor's FloEFD enables simulation results to be incorporated into the design process by the right person, in the right place, at the right time. The result is that we get the design right the first time, only have to make one prototype versus as many as twelve, and avoid expensive design changes in the late stages of the development process.”
The FloEFD suite offers a single environment to develop, analyze, and modify a complex electronic product design based on the original mechanical CAD model. Changes to the design are made directly, thereby enabling users to conduct “what-if” analysis. Products can be easily optimized for electronics cooling due to the availability of several key features:
