Simulation leaders explain how simulation-in-the-cloud eliminates barriers and streamlines design.

SimScale has sponsored this post.

All electronic devices produce heat as they perform their intended operations. If that energy is not dealt with, the system can overheat to the point that operations fail, and hardware is damaged. Depending on the use of the electronic device—say, a navigational system in an autonomous vehicle—these issues could result in catastrophic errors. Therefore, electronics cooling simulations are essential to ensure the technology behind numerous industries will not fail.

Browser-based technology enables the adoption of simulation without a massive investment in terms of deployment, training and costs. This helps engineers produce assessments, like this fluid flow and heat transfer simulation of an electronics enclosure. (Image courtesy of SimScale.)

Alexander Fischer, co-founder and product manager at SimScale, said, “all the big and fast-growing markets we see right now—energy distribution, energy storage, electric vehicles—what they have in common is that they are very data driven. You need electric devices to measure data, and you need electric devices to optimize these products. So, for essentially all the big and fast-growing industries, electronics is essential.”

However, Fischer notes that only a small fraction of engineers utilize simulation for electronics cooling. He suggests that the reasons behind this are that, traditionally, it isn’t easy to get simulation systems up and running. Organizations, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), experience these traditional hurdles, such as:

• Hardware limitations.
• Training costs.
• Licensing cost.
• Future proofing.

Jon Wilde, VP Product Management at SimScale, said, “Our hope is that simulation won’t be something that the simulation team has to do, or that only five percent of engineers use. Instead, every designer should have it in their toolbox. That’s the idea, the goal we have: that everybody involved in product development can do simulation. Product stakeholders can innovate and understand what their design can do.”

Fischer agreed that simulation should be about accessibility, flexibility and scalability, especially in the designing of electronic devices. He suggested that you might work on a desktop that has access to simulation-in-the-cloud. That offers scalability, but it might not be accessible. Meanwhile, other scalable and accessible cloud tools might not have the simulation coverage; this lacks flexibility. He argues that what differentiates SimScale is that it offers the combination of accessibility, flexibility and scalability to ensure that any engineer can design an electronic device correctly, in a few iterations.

For more about SimScale, watch the webinar Thermal Optimization of Forced Convection Cooling for Battery Packs. Or, try out the software yourself here.

A Business Case for Simulation Technology in the Electronics Industry 

First, let’s dig into how SMEs can quickly integrate and afford simulation. SimScale addresses this problem because its cloud-native, browser-based technology can be adopted without a huge commitment with respect to deployment, training and costs.

Cloud-native simulation enables streamlined internal workflows and removes bottlenecks. Engineers and designers can work from anywhere, share and collaborate with colleagues and customers. (Image courtesy of SimScale.)

“It means you can access SimScale from anywhere. There are no more restrictions, licensing and installation. There is no barrier to get started. Basically, you don’t need an administrator to help you, you can immediately decide to use it,” Wilde said. In other words, engineers pay for what they use, and can access the technology at anytime, anywhere.

Since the cloud-native simulation tool is browser-based, it is also easy to take advantage of the latest collaboration technology. This enables better collaboration between colleagues. Not only can you access the simulation from a coffee shop, but you can also share it with a team member, across the world, who can work on it while you sleep. This means no more terabytes of data to share with colleagues, experts, validators or decision makers.

Erick Kopff, Mechanical Engineer at OnLogic, explains that the ability to easily share SimScale projects is “incredibly helpful, especially when getting higher level management and decision makers’ buy-in on projects, especially if there is a large economic investment required. One thing that we have really done with SimScale is to run these simulations in a way that gives our management the ability to give a yes, or no, on a project very early on.”

Additionally, with the scaling the cloud offers, SimScale users can get development time down and reduce physical prototyping. All the simulations can be done in the same time you would traditionally produce one simulation. “That allows you to get as fast to market as before, but you can do the optimization loop in-between,” Fischer added.

With that much iteration, the role of physical prototyping can be reduced in the design process. Fischer went a step further, saying, “Physical prototyping shouldn’t be part of the design process anymore; it’s a simple validation step after.”   

Wilde explained, “It’s important that everything is properly and efficiently designed, so that you don’t have too many design cycles—and ideally only one. It takes a long time to build something, design it and have it fail over and over. You want to optimize it through simulation, so the first prototype is the final design.”

There are further business advantages to the optimization capabilities of simulation-in-the-cloud. “If you don’t use simulation to find the optimum, and you over-engineer, then you have spent too much money and you got something that is too expensive. It is no longer competitive to sell. You need to find the sweet spot right where you’ve optimized the design to where it’s going to perform correctly, meet the requirements and all warranty and guarantees you offer.”

This is especially true in the electronics industry where costs are very competitive, and products need to work reliably and be delivered under tight deadlines.

How Simulation Simplifies Electronics Cooling Design

Currently, SimScale has electronics customers that use its technology to optimize thermal management in various products, including:

• Battery modules.
• Power electronics enclosures.
• Sensors.
• LED fixtures.

“We essentially approach [simulation] from the physical side. As there is heat being emitted from electronics components, we need to look at all the mechanisms of heat transfer. That is conduction, convection (whether forced or natural) and thermal radiation. These decide how well something can be cooled and how the heat transfer in the system turns out.” Fischer said. “The cool thing about simulation is that you can take all three of these into account and figure out which ones are significant and what you can improve. You don’t need to make assumptions up front by thinking one is more or less important.”

Simulation streamlines the optimization of electronics cooling solutions allowing the full exploration of the design space to avoid over-engineering while meeting customer’s requirements. (Image courtesy of SimScale.)

When engineers assume that a mechanism of heat transfer is insignificant, it simplifies manual calculations, but it can also introduce errors into the models. Additionally, ignoring certain mechanisms of heat transfer can blind engineers to new solutions. That is why SimScale is designed to simplify the simulation process to a point where anyone who understands the physics can understand what is happening without ignoring any heat transfer method.

Kopff notes the benefit of “tools that break down a lot of the complex things in thermal simulation, and in stress analysis, into more layman’s terms. There are a lot of variables and terminology flying around within the simulation space. Understanding that, as an engineer that is also doing other work, can be very time consuming. The way that SimScale breaks down a lot of the complex concepts into the things everyday engineers can understand, who are not necessarily a ‘Master of Simulation Software,’ is very helpful. We’re able to speak the same design language.”

Another way that SimScale simplifies the simulation process is by guaranteeing that work-in-progress is consistently saved and up to date. “Everything is remote,” said Wilde. “So, if you do any kind of CAD preparation, simulation and post-processing, everything is on the Cloud. There’s no risk of losing work. Everything is concurrent and saved.” This is useful because traditionally complex and time-consuming steps will never have to be done a second time.

One last complexity that cloud-native simulation tackles is the access to computational resources. Since everything is on the cloud, your local machine does not have to perform calculations and is free to carry on with other tasks. You just send the simulation to HPC in the cloud, and it runs. There is no need to schedule and queue simulations that run on a local machine—the cloud never shuts down and always has capacity. And since you are no longer relying on that local machine, you can finally shut it off, reducing local energy consumption—which can save money and IT resources over time.

How Simulation-on-the-Cloud Streamlines Internal Workflows

SimScale’s engineers are not able to see customer data, or details about a simulation project. But they do know if users run into error messages.

“We offer proactive support,” Wilde explained. “Every other company must be reactive, so they have to wait for the customer to say, ‘Hey, I need help’ and you normally wait hours or days. Through error messages, we know if people are having problems … and we can pop up the chat window and say, ‘We see you’re struggling with meshing, can we help?’ Which is amazing! You get help the moment you need it.”

By tracking these errors, SimScale is also able to know where users are struggling overall. The company can assess where these bumps happen to continuously improve the software, workflows, UI and processes.

By proactively engaging users and optimizing the simulation software, based on hard user data, SimScale is able to help streamline engineering workflows.

SimScale’s UI also provides tools that can simplify work. “Our advantage is the fact that we have everything in one place, and once your CAD is uploaded you can clean it, run that simulation and then do all the post processing. Everything is interconnected. You never need to leave the environment once you’re there,” Wilde said.

Not only is this convenient for the user, but it is also useful from a training perspective. With everything in one place, under a unified UI, SimScale is easy to learn. Once users get started on one simulation, it is not hard to expand to other simulation workflows in what is known as a multi physics environment.

“A cooling simulation preparation will look the same as a structural analysis,” Fischer said. “So, you only need to get familiar with SimScale once. You don’t need to get familiar with every analysis type or every type of physics. You need one solution, SimScale, and then you can answer different problems with simulation.”

For more about SimScale, watch the webinar Thermal Optimization of Forced Convection Cooling for Battery Packs. Or, try out the software yourself here.