Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced the latest release of its market-leading FloTHERM® product, the industry’s most powerful and accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software for electronics cooling simulation. The latest product offers new functionality aimed at increasing user effectiveness and productivity. The FloTHERM product includes Command Center, which allows users to understand the product design space by defining variations of the base models. The Command Center design window streamlines the interface and user work to achieve productivity gains. Addressing the needs of industries which demand product reliability including automotive, aerospace, and electronics, the FloTHERM product quickly identifies potential thermal problems early in the design stage to significantly lower the costs of thermal testing and design re-work, enabling customers to get their products to market more quickly.

The Command Center is used to create and solve variants of a FloTHERM model. This enables a complete understanding of the product design space and allows the thermal engineer to make informed design decisions. Automatic design optimization tools can be deployed in Command Center to systematically design aspects of the product. The Command Center also supports calibration tasks using T3Ster® thermal characterization-based models for even more accurate thermal simulations.

“I find the Command Center indispensable for running the many scenarios that I need to make sure that I do not just have a working design, but the best working design possible for my circumstances,” said Wendy Luiten, thermal design, electronics cooling specialist, at Wendy Luiten Consultancy.

The new functionality in the Command Center tool is based on customer feedback for usability and productivity and introduces several critical features that make scenario definition and design space exploration intuitive and fast: easy-to-find objects, attributes and settings; “find” tool with multiple applications for variant creation; easy interaction with spreadsheet tools; and efficient simulation of hundreds of models.

Additional FloTHERM product features The new FloTHERM release provides additional features for productivity and accurate thermal simulation, including:

• Support for Phase Change Materials (PCM). Encapsulated PCMs have become a common thermal solution for consumer applications, and have been difficult to simulate in the past. FloTHERM now accepts latent heat and melt temperature as inputs and utilizes these values automatically in transient applications. The impact of PCMs on component and touch temperatures can now be fully explored and optimized in FloTHERM.
• Industry standard ODB++ data can now be used to bring printed circuit board (PCB) designs into FloTHERM. FloTHERM will now fit alongside any PCB layout tool in the design flow.
• Blind and buried vias are fully supported in PCB model definition. This greatly improves results accuracy when conduction into the PCB is on the critical heat flow path.
• Improved parallel solver that produces faster and more scalable results for a broader range of applications.

“Our new FloTHERM product with Command Center addresses the thermal design challenges of today’s advanced products, with automated features to make ideal design decisions for optimal product performance with confidence,” stated Roland Feldhinkel, general manager of the Mentor Mechanical Analysis Division.

Product availability The new FloTHERM product with Command Center is available now. For additional product information, go to: www.mentor.com/products/mechanical/flotherm/