Handling Arbitrary Shaped Boundaries in Classic and AEDT Icepak

Hello, this is Mert Berkman with Ozen Engineering. Today I'm going to make a demo regarding iSpec and we're going to be dealing with arbitrary shaped surfaces.

Please be sure to correct any misspelled Ansys product names as you transcribe, eg, whenever you have non-primitive shapes, even as like a quarter circle or this complicated surface, particularly in classic Icepak, associating that surface as an opening is not as straightforward.

With AEDT, it is, and I'll still show that example in AEDT as well. So that's what I want to focus on today. For that purpose, what I would like to do is first, you know, select this inlet surface, do Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and as you can see it added a surface. I'm going to delete this object for now.

And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to save as only the surface in STL format. Because that is the format that Icepak likes. So I'm gonna call this Inlet and I'm just gonna do undo, recover our solid back. Let's do our outlet, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, adds this surface.

Now I'm just going to quickly remove these others. I'm going to again do a save as with STL. And then I'm going to save this as outlet in the same folder. And then I'll do undo.

I'm going to pick the middle, the complex shape, do a Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and we're going to delete this, delete that, save this as hotwall. This is a hot wall, so we're going to assign a hot wall temperature here. And let's just do undo. And we actually don't need these surfaces anymore.

And while here, why don't I go ahead and save my domain as well. Save the file as a Discovery file. After this, typically if we want to go to classic Icepak, we want to convert this into an Icepak object.

If we apply what you will see is you know it kind of simplified and you know we lost our object it all filled in so we this is not what we want to do we want to treat this as a CAD object for now and let have a you know a bit higher quality let select our object so now you know this is our new geometry that is in Icepak form and the next step I'm going to go ahead and do a Workbench project so that we can transfer this information into an Icepak model.

In the Workbench environment, first we want to bring our geometry in. If you are using a solid domain, you do not need a cabinet. Double click on the cabinet, go to geometry, and click on the button. Click continue. We are done. We are going to be modeling this fluid block with a hole in it.

First step is to define our boundaries. Now, once we select CAD, we need to load the file. Remember that I had created an STL file separately for the inlet. So we're going to go ahead and pick that one. Let's select Inlet and let's hit OK.

And as you can see, it kind of superimposed this opening, because that surface is right on top of our domain.

And now our opening is defined, so quickly I'm going to say, OK, you know, let's, we're going to have a Z velocity, maybe like 3 meters per second, and just, I'll just hit update, so our inlet is defined. Now, let's do the similar for our outlet. Now, we need to define this face.

We're going to do another opening. Double click on it. Again, you know, it's not a usual shape. Let's go pick CAD. Let's load. Select outlet and hit update. So now you can see the opening to define and it's just going to be a pressure outlet, which means we don't have to change anything.

Now let say you know we have a heat source a solid object in this volume and then at the walls you know it employed it has it putting in some heat So how do we do that The way to do it is we can define it as a wall So double click on our wall. Let's edit this. Again our geometry is a complex shape.

select the CAD option, load the file, and select the hotwall file select properties, and set the heat flux to 1000, or fix the temperature to 60°C. Now let's do it the same in AEDT Icepak. As you've seen, I've opened Ansys Electronic Desktop application.

This is an environment where you can use many of the different electromagnetic tools. And Icepak AEDT serves as the thermal solver within this concept. Even though it is very similar to the classic Icepak in purpose, it's very different in its GUI, etc.

So it's a little bit of a learning curve moving from classic Icepak to AEDT Icepak. So now we're in the Icepak environment, and as you can see, it's very different than classic. So and Click the project name and add material Click the material name and add material.

Define boundary conditions for objects. and you'll notice we can do that in one step in AEDT. We're gonna hit F which means select faces.

So we're gonna go here for example, select our inlet, do a right mouse click, so this will be we're going to select assign thermal opening free and you know this will be our inlet. So we're going to define our velocity in the z direction, three meters per second and hit ok.

Now we want to click our outlet, so we select it again, assign thermal, opening, free, and we can just select pressure outlet. That's it. Whatever walls, etc. we don't touch, they're adiabatic. We want to add our heat source, so we're going to go ahead and select our CAD surface there.

Next, we're gonna assign this a wall called stationary and we're gonna assign maybe 60 degrees C and we're gonna hit finish. So under thermal you're gonna see our boundary conditions, by default ambient is 20 degrees C. We set up our case very similarly and then we can go ahead and mesh and execute.

So to do that, we're going to go to simulation. We're just going to do one-click meshing. Let's click generate mesh. Before that, it wants us to save. And that's always a good idea to save files.

so should be a very simple mesh again around 6000 cells you know similar strategy as before and you know we have not set up our case yet so we're going to do 100 we're going to solve radiation Now we can click analyze all and it's going to go ahead and prepare the job for Fluent and execute it in Fluent just like classic Icepak in the background.

Once the solution is done, let's just go ahead and add a center cut. I'd like to show you this. If you do not know, go to Icepak. If you go under Toolkit, Reporting, and Cut Plane. It's a bit tricky to reach this cut plane function compared to classic Icepak.

We want to do an X-Plane through the center. Let's show contours of temperature and hit create so it's going to go ahead work on it. It did it. Let's go ahead. Or is it still working? And then exit out of here. Let's hide our solid. So a lot of functions are with right mouse click.

We're going to do view, hide in active view. and then we can see our temperature distribution for example. So that concludes my presentation on some ways of handling arbitrary shape boundaries in classic and AEDT Icepak. Please contact us at https://ozeninc.com/contact for more information.