FloTHERM: Cool debottlenecking

I get to see a lot of interesting technology — some mega-packages, some more modest and some that just make me go “what a good idea!”.  Today Dr. Erich Buergel, General Manager of Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division (formerly Flomerics), told me about the latest version of FloTHERM.  FloTHERM is used to analyze the heat flow on, in and around electronics components and systems — everyone who has held a laptop on their lap understands the need for this type of analysis.  FloTHERM 9 (released in October) includes user interface and other enhancements, but the cool (pun intended) thing about the release is an innovation Mentor Graphics is calling “Bn” and “Sc”. Typical analyses point out what is wrong — where something will fail, overheat or deform under the predicted loads.  Bn (for Bottleneck) and Sc (Shortcut) help electronics designers figure out why and what to do about it.  Dr Buergel talked me through some very handy analogies, but the principles aren’t too complicated:  almost all processes have bottlenecks, where items in the process stack up because of a blockage.  Once one knows where the bottlenecks are, they can be mitigated.  But even after the design has been changed to deal with these areas of heat buildup, there may be other ways to further reduce heat buildup — the shortcuts.  Bn and Sc add fields to the standard FloTHERM outputs that identify where the design has thermal bottlenecks and where it would benefit from additional heat dissipation.  Using this information, the designer can effectively make changes, taking into account all of the other constraints on the design. What’s interesting about the Bn and Sc concept, to me, is that it provides a directionality to the typical approach of “build a model” -> “test it” -> “change it” -> “test it”.  The “change it” part of the process is often undirected, with the designer using trial and error to fix the identified problem.  Bn/Sc is a simple approach to solving a very specific problem that should take out a number of these cycles, getting to a faster overall solution. Dr. Buergel told me about one customer who used FloTHERM to analyze an electronic assembly, found problem areas, moved bottlenecks and so on and then realized that the design included a heat sink that was far too large.  Removing the extra material cut cost and weight, saving real money — in addition, of course, to getting the product to market faster than would have been possible without CAE. We’ve long recognized the benefits of moving from test bench to virtual testing;  are we now at the beginning of a wave of innovations that radically improve the efficiency of CAE?