Introducing Simcenter Flotherm 2019.2

When the product manager for Simcenter Flotherm, one of my favorite aspects of my job was demonstrating new features to users and watching their responses when they used them for the first time. In the months preceding the release of 2019.2, I attended certain meetings with a degree of passion I haven’t experienced with any other version. This is particularly true for the plot production acceleration feature, which renders charts thousands of times faster than in the past. Numerous grins and compliments for that!

This Simcenter Flotherm 2019.2 update aims to increase the efficiency of electronics cooling analysis for post-processing workflows, potentially saving thousands of engineering hours on the trickiest projects. Making the plots display more quickly is a significant and obvious way to increase productivity, but there are numerous more ways to do it as well. Here are some of my favorite improvements:

Plot location linked to objects. If the object moves in a future model variant, the plot follows along.
Plot location linked to maximum temperature. If the maximum temperature location changes in a model variant (say after the power distribution is updated), the plot automatically moves to find it.
On-Demand Tabular Data. Need the operating point of a fan? Just select the fan and the data appears instantly. Need the flow rate through a vent? Works the same way. In fact, all Flotherm objects now work in this way, making results interrogation a point-and-click process.
Find Tool for Results. Search for any kind of numerical result, and Simcenter Flotherm will select the objects that meet your criteria. E.g., find and select all Flotherm objects in a model that have surface temperatures greater than 40 degrees C, or find and select the component on a PCB that has the maximum junction temperature.
Post Processing Automation. In terms of saving engineering time, the best new feature of all is full scripting support for all post-processing features. This makes any post-processing workflow fully automated and fully customizable. For those users that really push Flotherm in terms of model complexity, results analysis has transformed from a lengthy manual process into a single-click operation to run a script that is done in a few seconds. You can literally save hours of engineering time per model with this capability. For large thermal engineering groups that create 100s of Simcenter Flotherm models per project, this time-saving multiplies quickly.

This Simcenter Flotherm 2019.2 release also improves the thermal digital twin support for modeling semiconductor packages and mobile device applications in two ways:

Support for multiple temperature sensors in the Power Controller Smartpart
Curve-based definitions of thermal conductivity vs. temperature for semiconductor materials.

These extensions build on the Boundary Condition Independent Reduced Order Modeling (BCI-ROM) and Thermal Netlist extraction features released in mid-2019 to create a flexible, fast, and accurate set of tools for the thermal design of semiconductor packages and thermal model supply chain support.

Introducing Simcenter Flotherm 2019.2

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