Thermal
Desktop is a PC based design environment for generating thermal
models of electronics and vehicles. Using Thermal Desktop, engineers
can use CAD drawings either directly as a thermal model, or indirectly
as scaffolding for fast "snap on" attachment of Thermal Desktop
elements, surfaces, and solids.
Thermal
Desktop incorporates both familiar parameter based (TRASYS like)
finite difference surfaces with finite elements with CAD technology
to model thermal problems. Thermal Desktop develops the capacitance
and conductance network for input to SINDA/FLUINT.
Thermal Desktop has thermal analysis specific type of capabilities
such as applying contact conductance, insulation, heat loads, and
heaters.
Thermal
Desktop provides full design parameterization using spreadsheet-like
variables and arbitrarily complex expressions as input, rather than
hardwired numbers. This allows complex models to be rapidly manipulated
using a few keystrokes, meaning that updating or maintaining a model
is trivially easy, as is performing sensitivity studies and investigating
what-if scenarios. This provides access to SINDA/FLUINT's Optimization
and Reliability Engineering modules, which can be used to size components,
maximize performance, find worst-case operating conditions (design
cases), correlate models to test data, and even treat uncertainties
statistically.
Thermal
Desktop is available for PC as a stand-alone tool (no external CAD
package required) or as an AutoCAD extension module. The following
add-on modules are available to expand the capabilities of Thermal
Desktop:
RadCAD®
is an optional thermal radiation analysis module for high temperature
and/or vacuum applications.
FloCAD®
adds the capability of modeling flow circuits, including fans
and convective heat transfer, attached directly to the surfaces
and solids.
Traditional
finite element functions such as showing free edges, merging coincident
nodes, hiding interior solid faces, and surface coating capabilities
Conductors
from a single node to multiple surfaces has been added to facilitate
convection modeling
Tools to
facilitate making movies (avi files) for post processing and viewing
the spacecraft in orbit
