Hello, I am a HV Electrical equipment case design engineer, and I have been asked to do a preliminary thermal analysis of my equipment case design. We have a dedicated CFD enginner who uses ANSYS, but due to his unavailibility (overworked & under paid - usuall story), I have to do it myself. I'm finding it a tedious and time consuming task to do the analysis by hand, using what I learned in those Thermodynamics lessons when I was at University. I would like to know if I can get my hands on some free software to perform a basic 2D (or, even better 3D)Heat Flow analysis. I will be asking my superiors for some suitable software very soon, so any trial software I could try out, I would consider buying.

Regards, Graham Henshaw.

Since already have ANSYS with you, I would go ahead and try working with that, than trying to use a free cfd package which might not have any documentation. Setting up flow and thermal problems with ANSYS is very easy in 2D and 3D. There are also many tutorials with ANSYS and there is also a news group 'xansys@onelist.com'which deals specifically with ANSYS questions. You will have to subscribe to it first. Look at www.onelist.com and search for xansys.

A good CFD free software é FEATFLOW. This software are avaliated for several UNIX and Windows plataforms. There are a lot of documentation about it. Visit www.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/~featflow/.

MARCIO AREDES MARTINS CHEMICAL ENGINEERING