Ansys Icepak

Start by pulling in your board and enclosure from ECAD/MCAD, then assign real power to each device using power maps or a simple table. Drop in fans, vents, heat sinks, and interface materials from libraries, or sketch custom parts if you need something nonstandard. Set ambient conditions, altitude, and operating modes. Press solve to get temperature, airflow, and pressure distributions, then sort hotspots by component priority. Nudge fan curves, add a baffle, widen a vent, or tweak heat sink fin spacing and rerun. Use cut-planes, pathlines, and temperature probes to confirm how air actually moves through the box before you commit to tooling.

For power modules and high-current traces, connect electrical inputs directly in the same model. Specify voltage or current on leads, include material resistivity vs. temperature, and let the solver compute resistive heating as it iterates with the thermal field. Verify bond wire loading, busbar losses, and copper pour temperatures under worst-case duty cycles. Try alternative stackups, TIM thicknesses, and mounting torque to see how contact resistance changes device junctions. Capture steady-state and transient events—fan failures, step loads, or warm-up—to ensure you meet derating rules without margin guessing.

When you’re ready to explore options, define parameters like fan RPM, vent pattern, fin count, board copper thickness, or ambient setpoints. Launch a design sweep to map performance across the range you care about. Build a reduced model that preserves the physics across those parameters to speed what-if checks and control tuning. With the lightweight model, you can evaluate dozens of operating modes in minutes or share it with system teams for integration studies. Improved startup and meshing get you to first results fast, and you can scale cores to turn around larger assemblies under tight schedules.

Before sign-off, line up the simulation with lab data. Import thermocouple and IR camera readings, match sensor locations, and compare cooldown and warm-up curves. Run shock and altitude scenarios to see how airflow and radiation shift outside standard test rooms. Generate a report in a few clicks with key plots, BOM-level summaries, and compliance checks. Hand it to design, reliability, and manufacturing so everyone sees the same temperature margins, fan settings, and assembly notes.