Material modeling improvements consist of a new material device (heat exchanger), additions to the Default material database, and a minor reorganization of the material editor to simplify cavitation simulation.
A good understanding of the thermal behavior of AEC, Data Center, and other architectural applications is essential for protecting expensive electronic components and data. Such an understanding promotes system sustainability and ensures human thermal comfort.
Heat exchangers and air conditioners are common elements in these systems, and play a significant role in their thermal management. Proper simulation of both is essential for optimizing thermal behavior.
The Heat Exchanger material device addresses this need. The Heat Exchanger device simulates several different heat exchanger devices commonly found in AEC, Data Center, and other architectural applications:
The device represents the physics on simple geometry, thereby reducing the complexity of the model.
The Default material database has been expanded with a variety of new fluids, solids, heat exchangers, and LED materials. Many of the solid materials are used in AEC applications, and include materials used in construction as well as soils and environmental substances.
Additionally, Solid Air, a solid material with the thermal properties of air, is now included in the Default database. This material is useful for simulating natural convection in electronics modules and other applications that have very small, fully enclosed regions. The air in these regions typically does not move very much due to buoyancy effects. Neglecting the flow in these regions while including the thermal effects reduces the overall model size and simulation time. The impact of this assumption on thermal accuracy has been shown to be minimal provided that the gap size is within a known "critical size."
To facilitate cavitation simulations, liquid materials in the Default material database are now automatically linked to their vapor material counterparts. For custom materials, there are now two ways to specify the vapor properties:
To specify vapor pressure using either of these methods, click Phase on the Material Editor. Note that this replaces the Vapor pressure Reference property, located on the Material Editor in previous versions.
Both of these methods ensure that the vapor pressure is included with the design study. This is important for results consistency when sharing design studies. Likewise, this system eliminates the need to append labels to material names to indicate their phase.
In prior releases, the Gas constant parameter was located in the Reference Properties section of the Material Editor. Because the Gas constant was not explicitly used for all property variation methods, this led to some confusion. To improve the workflow of the Material Editor, the Gas constant has been relocated to the property variation methods where it is applicable:
Additionally, the Reference Properties section has been eliminated from the Material Editor.