Mentor Graphics Corp. has announced its next-generation FloTHERM (for thermal simulations of electronic equipment such as converters and inverters) product featuring a new native Windows graphical user interface (GUI) to handle pre-processing and large models with ease, targeting today’s most advanced electronic designs. The latest release continues the product line’s 25 year history of technical product innovation and was developed based on extensive user feedback.
The new FloTHERM product was developed from user feedback from the company’s IDEAS website, soliciting requests on software enhancements and features that Mentor customers recommended and voted on as the most popular. Over 40 requests were fulfilled, resulting in the new Windows-compliant GUI, parallel CFD solver, and efficient handling of massive models for pre-processing, solving and post-processing.
“Improvements are always welcome when we talk hours of CPU time and hence, I was pleasantly surprised when I tested this new version of FloTHERM,” says Ir Clemens Lasance, Phillips Research Emeritus. “The scale-up is at least a factor of four on my computer with a dual processor, reducing the solution time from six hours to one-and-a-half for a specific project requiring two million cells.
New FloTHERM product capabilities include:
• The new Windows-compliant user interface can handle models with thousands of objects. A query-based search function, together with data columns integrated with the model node tree, provides critical model checking capabilities to define data, identify errors and to further enhance the FloTHERM user experience.
• A new parallel solver provides scalability and fast performance for multi-processors. This capability was the #1 requested functionality from the Mentor customer-feedback portal, and makes this FloTHERM release on average two to three times, and up to 14 times, faster than previous versions.
• New modeling objects represent racks of equipment and data center cooling devices enables users to simulate and optimize everything from a chip to an entire room.
• The transient thermostatic control modeling allows varying model inputs in time and as a function of the temperature during a transient simulation. A key benefit from this feature is the ability to reduce component power dissipation, either the component’s own temperature, or those from external stimuli. Customers involved with thermostatic control systems, such as consumer electronics, computing and hand-held telephony and tablets find this new functionality helpful.
• The FloTHERM product now also supports fluid-structure interaction through a mesh-based parallel code coupling interface (MpCCI) bridge developed at the Fraunhofer Institute SCAI. Now engineers can export CFD analysis data for finite element analysis (FEA) with a wide range of popular structural simulation programs thereby enabling users to conduct multi-disciplinary analyses
Mentor Graphics
http://www.mentor.com/products/mechanical/products/flotherm
Mechanical Analysis from Mentor Graphics
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