Hello,

I'm an engineer working on modeling fluid/thermal phenomena associated with semiconductor processing equipments, i.e. furnaces at high temperatures (~1000°C).

A typical problem is to simulate a silicon wafer moving in a process bell jar (like a piston in a cylinder) with high temp heat source around it. Obviously radiation plays an important role here and I'm also concerned about things like non-gray radiation, temperature-dependent material thermal properties and boundary conditions.

Any suggestions on some CFD packages with decent radiation treatment capability? Thanks.

X.Y.

Hello. I just attended the ASME Fluids Division conference in Washington DC. An engineer from Fluent Inc presented a paper on the implimentation of radiation modeling in their CFD package. It sounded as if this would be part of Fluent very soon. You might want to contact them. The presenter's name is Dr. C. K. Lim in the Automotive industry team at Fluent Inc.

I also heard a paper presented by a developer from Fluent on their implementation of a radiation model for participating media (at the 1998 AIAA Reno meeting.) The model they implemented is basically the same as the one developed by George Raithby (my PhD advisor, so I'm admittedly biased) and Eddy Chu, and which has been implemented in CFX-TASCflow (http://www.aeat.co.uk/cfx) for a while. Most commercial codes also have surface-to-surface radiation models.

CFD-ACE has been developed by CFDRC(CFD Research Corporation) and has a few strong capabilities on radiation. The main features of CFD-ACE regarding radiation are Discrete-ordinate thermal radiation model and Gray and Non-gray Radiation(up to 10 bands) and conjugate heat transfer..

It has been used in major semiconductor companies and you will find many papers published. If I mention a few, AIAA-95-2020, 2566, and 0501. In addition, some success stories were published on some magazines - Semiconductor International, August 1996, Machine Design January 11, 1996 and European Semiconductor Nov. 96 and others. If you need more information, please visit www.cfdrc.com.

In addition, CFDRC provides a few softwares focused on Semiconductor.

CFD-PLASMA(ICP) for Inductively Coupled PLASMA systems

CFD-Particle for the simulation of particulate formation, growth and transport in Semiconductor

fabrication systems

CFD-Film for the simulation of surface phenomena such as adsorption, diffusion, coalescence

reaction, and desorption in vapor phase processing systems.