ElectronicsCooling magazine was founded more than 12 years ago with a mission of providing current and practical thermal management information with archival value. I hope you agree this magazine is still delivering on its original promise. The last word in the mission statement is value, and each of us, as a thermal engineer, desires to add value to our projects. Admittedly, the term value can be highly subjective, but I frequently encounter engineers working thermal issues who could increase the value of their efforts by recognizing that one can fall into a trap of spending hours and hours working away at a computer simulation, which in the end may not amount to more than playing a video game. No offense is intended to the video game industry. In fact many of the fast graphic representations we enjoy today would likely not exist without them.
Nearly every recent engineering graduate working in thermal management has excellent skills in using some form of computer software, be it solid modeling or analysis. Software expertise is often sought after and even explicitly stated in job applications. The advent of solid modeling and advanced simulation tools allows us to design quicker, smaller, and cheaper than ever before. However, it is worth mentioning some of the differences between solid modeling and analysis. A solid model provides value in conveying the geometry of a design, mass estimates, and tolerances as well as making very nice pictures for a variety of purposes. The mathematics associated with keeping track of the shape and size of an object is not necessarily that complex.
The physics of fluid flow and heat transfer coupled with the geometry typical in electronics packaging are complex. We also deal with heat flux values that only occur in nature associated with high temperatures, yet we design cooling systems to prevent these high temperatures. Considering the complexity, it is unreasonable to expect that training in a particular software simulation tool by itself will produce quality thermal designs.
As thermal engineers, much of our value is in solving, one hopes, the correct problem. One of the causes of “video game simulation syndrome” is that the problem was never fully comprehended in the first place. There is a tendency to just charge ahead using software without taking time to make sure the problem to be solved makes sense and is fully comprehended. Sometimes default parameters are accepted even though they don’t apply. One has to appreciate the prior generation of thermal analysts who did not have today’s computational resources. Computer memory limits (maybe 1000 nodes) forced them to spend their initial effort in fully understanding the physics of the problem, rather than making sure the geometry was well represented. Schedule and budget was usually allocated to verify these “small” models because they were not expected to be perfect.
Expectations of rapidly producing accurate simulations are often unrealistic. Some of the reasons for this include a large number of published articles that highlight the excellent agreement between test and simulation (it isn’t likely that a poor agreement article would get published) and the tendency of some suppliers to highlight only examples where the software performed well (an understandable marketing approach). However, it is important to realize that the touted excellent agreement required a thorough understanding of the problem as well as a time investment making sure the software was solving the intended problem.
An often repeated expression is “a picture is worth a thousand words.” By that measure, this editorial is almost worth a picture (or isotherm), and maybe even a smaller fraction of a time-dependent animation. However, the next time you proudly show off a contour plot of results, make sure it really represents the problem you were tasked to solve.
Finally, in the technical communication field, my personal feeling is that you will never go broke giving credit. It has been a year since the departure of Kaveh Azar as editor-in-chief. Kaveh’s vision, persistence, and strong work ethic still have a positive influence on ElectronicsCooling magazine and we are grateful and indebted to him.
