Encyclopaedia Index

CHAM's Special-Purpose Flow-Simulation software

COFFUS

Coal and oil-burning furnaces

CVD

Chemical-vapour-deposition reactors

ESTER

Electrolytic aluminium smelters (Hall-cell type)

FLAIR

Flow of air, heat and smoke inside buildings and other enclosures

HOTBOX

Flow of heat and air in electronic equipment

HOTBOX

1. HOTBOX is a version of PHOENICS which has been customised for the simulation of the flow of heat and air (or other coolant) in electronics equipment.

2. It differs from other commercially-available software packages serving similar purposes in the following respects:
   • it allows electronics-cooling problems to be set up by way of an easy-to-use virtual-reality user interface, the input to which may be the output from an industry-standard CAD package;
   • it allows fine details of the geometry to be accurately handled by the embedding of fine computational grids around them;
   • it employs the unique and economical LVEL method of simulating the low-Reynolds number turbulence which characterises electronics equipment;
   • it employs the unique and economical IMMERSOL method of simulating the surface-to-surface radiative heat transfer which plays an important role in evening-out the temperatures within electronics equipment;
   • because it can draw on all the capabilities of the PHOENICS solver, it can compute the displacements, stresses and strains, which are caused by the non-uniformities of temperature, and which may influence the performance or the life of the equipment;
   • for the same reason, HOTBOX can also introduce fluids of more than one composition and phase into the same simulation.

3. Like PHOENICS, HOTBOX can be used on any hardware platform, from PC to super-computer; and it works well on parallel PC clusters.

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