Ansys Icepak and electronic cooling analysis

Ansys Icepak is a CFD solver for electronics thermal management. It predicts airflow, temperature and heat transfer in IC packages, PCBs, electronic assemblies/enclosures and power electronics. Ansys Icepak provides powerful electronic cooling solutions that utilize the industry-leading Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver for thermal and fluid flow analyses of integrated circuits (ICs), packages, printed circuit boards (PCBs) and electronic assemblies. 

With CAD-centric (mechanical and electrical CAD) and multiphysics user interfaces, Icepak facilitates the solving of today’s most challenging thermal management problems in electronics products and assemblies. Icepak uses sophisticated CAD healing, simplification and metal fraction algorithms that reduce simulation times while providing highly accurate solutions that have been validated against real-world products. The solution’s high degree of accuracy results from the highly automated, advanced meshing and solver schemes, which ensure a true representation of the electronics application.

Key Features

Icepak includes all modes of heat transfer — conduction, convection and radiation — for steady-state and transient electronics cooling applications.

• Electronics Desktop 3D layout GUI
• DC joule heating analysis
• Multiple-fluid analysis
• Reduced order flow and thermal
• Thermo-electric cooler modelling
• Package characterization
• Integrated graphical modeling environment

In this blog post, First we will generate a basic electronic geometry in Ansys Icepak using the readily available primitive blocks. The video below can be used as a tutorial to learn the graphical user interface of Icepak and generate simple geometries. 

Once the geometry is ready, in the next video, we will generate a conformal mesh and set it up for calculation. 

Using the generated computational grid, we will solve the fluid flow and heat transfer problem and post-process the results within Icepak.