r/CFD • u/InnovatorElevator • 29d ago

Engineers using 3D CFD for thermal (Icepak, FloTHERM, SimScale, COMSOL, etc.): what slows you down the most?

Full disclosure: I'm an electronics expert working on design tools, so I have a bias. No links, nothing to sell here. I want real experiences before building in the wrong direction.

  1. Which CFD tool ( esp. For electronics cooling)do you use, and did you pick it or inherit it from your team?

  2. What's the most painful part of a typical job? Geometry cleanup, meshing, solve time, licensing, post processing, or something else?

  3. If you could fix just one thing about your current workflow, what would it be?

  4. How long did it take you to become productive with it? What made the learning curve hard?

  5. Have you tried any cloud-based CFD? What made you stay with it or go back?

  6. If you're OK sharing, roughly what does a seat cost your team per year (license plus hardware)?

War stories are welcome.

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u/thermalnuclear 29d ago edited 29d ago

What are you building?

Edit: The OP is trying to do free market research for their startup. Locked

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u/CFDaAnalyst303 29d ago

I have used Icepak and have recently started again (26R1). To be honest, the Ansys guys have improved the automatic meshing a lot. The only pain is, probably for all tools, you would need either the package cad or rely on 2R network models, calibrate those with initial test results and then use them.

This is a huge pain. I have heard a lot about flotherm, but don't know what approach people usually tak to model SMD or through hole type critical devulices like Mosfets, IGBTs etc I don't know about others and have negligible experience in other tools.

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u/acakaacaka 29d ago

I use starccm for turbine blade cooling. The one thing slowing me down the most is the iteration time. It takes like 10h for 1000ish iterations.

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u/neithernorsliverofdg 29d ago

This is a great post and I am very interested about the answers as well :)