Week 5.1 - Non-Conformal Meshing and Solving a Cold plate model

AIM: To simulate thermal performance of cold plate.

Cold plate is used for maintaining temperature of electronics components below the maximum operating temperature by removing heat. Modern cold plate uses liquids as medium to carry away generated heat.

Create Geometry

Step 1: Resize cabinet with dimensions: 400mm `times` 300mm `times` 200mm in X, Y and Z direction.

Step 2: Create solid block with start (50 mm, 80mm, 70 mm) and end (350mm, 220 mm, 130 mm).

Assign 'Al-Extrude' as the material of solid block.

Step 3: Create inlet and outlet pipe using 'block'.

Inlet pipe with center at (100mm, 0 mm, 100mm), radius of 15mm, thickness 5mm and height 80mm.

Assign 'Al-Extrude' material to the inlet pipe.

Create the outlet pipe with same material at given location by making copy of inlet pipe.

Center at (300mm, 0 mm, 100mm), radius of 15mm, thickness 5mm and height 80mm.

Step 4: Create a block with start (60 mm 90mm, 80 mm) and end (340mm, 210 mm, 120mm).

Assign 'water' as material to the fluid block.

Step 5: Create fluid domain inside pipe.

Create cylindrical blosk with center at (100mm, 0mm, 100mm), radius of 15mm and height of 90mm.

Assign 'water' as material to the block.

Create 'outlet fluid' domain by making copy of 'inlet fluid' domain at a distance of 200mm in X-direction.

Step 6: Create two conducting thick plates with thickness of 10mm and dimensions (260 mm X 100 mm) on top and bottom of the solid block.

Assign 'Al-Extruded' material to the plate and total power of 200W.

Create another plate at a distance of 70mm in Z-direction.

After creating geometry, it is meshed using non-conformal meshing technique to reduce unnecessary element counts.

To create non-conformal meshing, first one needs to create assembly from all the created components.

Generate Mesh

Initially by using the default meshing parameters, mesh is generated.

Mesh is refined near the solid objects to capture the flow physics accurately by using local mesh refinement. A high quality of mesh is generated using non-conformal meshing technique as shown below.

Total number of elements: 554138 (~0.55M)

Apply boundary conditions

Create openings at Min and Max X of cabinet walls.

Also, create openings at the inlet of 'inlet fluid' domain with inlet velocity of 0.2 m/s in Y-direction.

Similarly create opening at exit of 'outlet fluid' domain with static pressure 0.

After applying boundary conditions, temperature at 3 points are monitored shown in figure below.

Probelm Set up

Turn off Radiation

Set turbulent zero equation for flow regime

Set gravity on in negative Y-direction

Set convergence criteria to default and set number of iteration as 5000.

Steady state simulation

Convergence plot and temperature variation at three monitor points.

a. Plane cut

b. Vector plot

c. Object face plot

Conclusion

From above results, it can be observed that, cold plate is able to maintain maximum temperature of about 27.6795.