FloCAD
Introduction
FloCAD is a Thermal Desktop module that allows a user to develop and integrate both fluid and thermal systems within a CAD based environment.
With FloCAD, the mechanics of building fluid submodels is very similar to that of building thermal submodels, with many of the commands working on components of both types of submodels. FloCAD adds the capability of modeling flow circuits, including fans and convective heat transfer, attached directly to the surfaces and solids representing PCB boards, chips, etc. It is specifically targeted for electronic packaging design tasks, but since it provides full access to the powerful and general-purpose SINDA/FLUINT thermohydraulic analyser, FloCAD can be used in other industries as well.
FloCAD is fully compatible with Thermal Desktop features, including full parameterisation 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 Optimisation and Reliability Engineering modules, which can be used to size components, maximise performance, find worst-case operating conditions (design cases), correlate models to test data, and even treat uncertainties statistically.