Thermal Analysis

What we do

Thermal analysis is the business of predicting what temperature will be, and where, across the whole duty cycle. We solve fluid and solid together (conjugate heat transfer — CHT), so a surface temperature is computed rather than assumed.

Where steady state is not enough we run transient: warm-up time, thermal inertia, heat accumulated over a cycle.

The physics is the same everywhere; what changes is the cycle itself. The warm-up curve of an engine block, the summer load on a data centre cabinet, the bake cycle of an oven, the overload minutes of a transformer, the thermal profile of a flight — all are solved with the same equations under different boundary conditions.

Scope

• Conjugate heat transfer (CHT) — solid and fluid solved together
• Transient analyses — warm-up, cool-down and the full duty cycle
• Environmental conditions: ambient, altitude, solar load, fouling
• Radiation: surface-to-surface and participating media
• Natural and forced convection
• Phase change and evaporative cooling
• Passing the temperature field to structural analysis for thermal stress

Why it matters

Whether a component survives is usually decided not by its average temperature but by the hottest point and the gradient there. A calculation run on averages can report "acceptable" while the local temperature sits above the material limit.

Equally, a system can be safe at steady state and exceed its limit during warm-up. Without a transient study that never shows up.