🚀 go-pugleaf

Our mechanical design engineers are interested in acquiring software that
will model an electronic instrument's thermal behavior. The main goal is to
optimize initial PWB layouts and mechanical packaging designs prior to
prototyping by predicting the thermal performance and adjusting for lowest
component temperatures. Our instruments range from relatively simple (2 PWB,
closed box, no fan) to complex (many PWB's of differing orientations and
sizes, fan and ducts). If you have had experience with commercially
available thermal modeling software packages, we would like to hear from 
you. Specifically, we would like to find out:

     1.  The program name, vendor and what machine you ran it on.
     2.  The type of system you modeled, its complexity, etc.
     3.  Your general impressions of the product, good and bad experiences,
         how long it took to learn, support quality and so on.
     4.  If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently?
     5.  Does your organization have a "thermal guru", or does each group
         acquire its own tools and learn how to use them?
     6.  Anything else that you think might help us make a decision.

We have vendors pushing finite element modeling systems such as ANSYS along
with an additional program such as FIDAP which models both natural and
forced fluid behavior (in order to determine the convective heat transfer
within the instrument). There are also several packages for PC's which look
attractive and are considerably less expensive (COSMOS/M , ANSYS-PC, etc.).

Please mail your responses directly to me rather than posting to the net. I
will post a summary if there is any kind of consensus.    Thank you.

                                   Alan Thompson
                                   ihp4!uw-beaver!fluke!alan