Simplified fans in electronics cooling

A simplified fan is created from the as-modeled fan, automatically, when you identify it as a fan in an electronics cooling study.

A cooling fan is a geometrically complicated device featuring a blade/hub assembly and a housing with supporting structure. A voxel mesh sufficiently refined to capture the details of the geometry requires that the blade assembly be modeled as a rotating part, which both complicates boundary condition setup and also may compromise solution stability. Resolving an as-modeled fan for the purpose of simulation, therefore, is a costly enterprise, both in time and in tokens.

Cooling fan	Cooling fan voxel mesh

The simplification methodology accepts the fan assembly (left) and produces the representation (middle) which consists of only two parts including (1) the fan housing (blue), and (2) an annulus that replaces the blade disk assembly and represents the flow passage through the fan from the hub to cowl (gold). The fan cowl and hub radii are automatically derived, directly from the as-modeled fan assembly. The final image (right) shows how the simplified fan fits and represents the as-modeled fan.

As-modeled cooling fan	Cooling fan simplified representation	Cooling fan idealization

Fan simplification is automatically generated for any fan regardless of its size, configuration, or orientation within the model. A default solid material is automatically assigned to the fan housing, and the prescribed volumetric flow rate is mapped to the core region. For instances in which the underlying algorithm fails, the hub and cowl radii default to 35% and 90% of the minimum width of the fan housing, respectively.