Electronic controls are already indispensable in many mechatronic devices of vehicles or machines. Beside the mere control function, design of electronic control cards has to take into account energy consumption and durability. To this end, the layout of circuit paths, the formation of temperature in controller components, and the heat dissipation have to be considered. The virtual determination of these factors leads to a multiply coupled analysis for electric current distribution, detection of heat sources, and temperature field on the control card.

To solve this task, a process has been developed in the past months which performs a coupling of electro-thermal analysis with PERMAS and CFD analysis with OpenFOAM. In PERMAS, a 3D structural model is used to calculate the electric current and the temperature including heat exchange by radiation. In OpenFOAM, natural convection is calculated for the interior of the control box, and forced convection is calculated for the incident flow.

As a practical example, the coupling for a power module of an engine cooling unit has been performed. More information and a small film on the subject can be found here. For more details on PERMAS or the coupling with OpenFOAM please send us an e-mail to info@intes.de.

For the FEA software PERMAS and its pre- and post-processor VisPER, INTES has released and shipped the new versions PERMAS Version 14 and VisPER Version 3 after two years of development.

Among numerous extensions and enhancements the following achievements will be highlighted here:

Contact analysis in PERMAS has been extended by contact geometry update which provides a new contact algorithm for siginificant changes of contacts during loading. The contact location is updated in order to allow for large relative displacements or for more accurate contact results. Contact updating works with or without friction and it can be used with linear or nonlinear static analysis.

Dynamic vibration analysis can be performed much faster in particular for models with a high number of modes (> 10000). In this way, the run time for a 15000 modes problem was more than halfened. For subsequent modal periodic response nalysis an additional speed-up could be achieved by a factor up to three.

A new Mixed-Boundary Craig-Bampton condensation allows for free boundaries during ondensation or mixed free and fixed boundaries during condensation in an easy-to-use way. So, realistic boundary conditions can be reflected by general and very efficient condensation techniques.

New features provide frequency-dependent stiffness and damping for modal response analysis and rotation speed dependent stiffness and damping for complex mode and time-history response analysis in an efficient manner.

Many extensions were made for the integrated optimization in PERMAS and the related pre- and post-processing in VisPER. With its modern graphical user interface, VisPER supports easy modelling for topology optimization, sizing, shape and bead optimization. All these optimization methods are available with PERMAS and provide efficient optimizations in one software.

Altogether, almost all functionalities in PERMAS benefit from the development effort over the past two years, from linear and nonlinear statics over NVH and acoustics up to optimization. The new software version provides higher performance and extended functionality to all users.

More information on PERMAS and VisPER and their new releases is available from INTES homepage (www.intes.de).

INTES will attend the NAFEMS Regional Conferences in Bamberg on 8-9 Mai 2012 and in Gothenburg on 22-23 Mai 2012. Paper presentations will be given and INTES will participate in the accompanying exhibition at these conferences (see NAFEMS website for Bamberg event) and (see NAFEMS website for Gothenburg event).

In Bamberg, INTES will talk about "Vibration Compatible Design of Beads" to describe the bead generation for dynamic applications in PERMAS.

In Gothenburg, INTES will give the presentation "Simulation of Part Assemblies under Various Loading Conditions" about part connections using contact analysis in PERMAS.

You can see the detailed programme here. Please note that all workshops will be held in German. If you wish an English training please contact us for an individual arrangement.