Joule (Trace) Heating Simulation with Ansys Icepak

Hello, welcome to another video demonstration by Ozen Engineering where we love to do analysis using ANSYS products. In this demonstration, I'm going to talk about the calculation of Joule heating due to traces in a PCB.

For this purpose, I'm going to start with an existing model that was actually presented previously in YouTube. You may find that video.

It is titled "PCB modeling with ANSYS iSpec." So, this is in a sense continuation of that model where we have a PCB board and where we imported traces on our PCB board. This board also has some components with heat loads on it. And this is kind of what it looks like.

And again, the goal of this video is to compute the heating capacity due to Joule or trace heating. So, let's double click on our board outline. Under Geometry, we already imported our ECAD file.

What we would like to do is now go under Model Trace Heating by clicking the edit button, which is going to bring up this new window. And we'd like to work on the layer called INT1- 3. So, here what we're seeing is we're seeing a set of different traces.

And what I'd like to do is to create a solid trace for the trace that is named A3V 3. So, let me click on that. So, this will be the trace of interest. What I would like to do is tighten these trace limits in order to, you know, ignore unnecessary fine details.

So, I'm going to make the maximum angle 135 and the minimum length 1 millimeter. And then let's hit Create Solid Trace. And we're going to hit Done. So, once we hit the Create button, you'll notice that there's a new object here, a new block based on that particular layer.

So, let me double click on this layer. And, but, you know, so we can edit it. Before that, let's, you know, make it more visible. So, I'm going to go under Display Options. And I'm going to hit the Shading. And I'll convert it to.

And here now we see, you know, the solid block created for this particular trace. So. Under Geometry. Now we see this polygon with all these vertices around 184 vertices. So, that's good to confirm. Then let's go to the Properties window.

And under here, we see that, you know, there's dual heating option turned on. We want to click Edit. And then enter some values. Looks like these values do make sense. So, now that we're comfortable with these numbers, let's hit Done. And then we'd like to now generate two sources.

So, for this purpose, let's go to the Create Sources button right here. Click on it. And then we can make the changes on the bottom right-hand side. So, for Source 1, I'm going to enter these numbers. And then we can make the changes on the bottom. And it applies.

So, that's our Source 1. And then let's go to the Properties window. And I'm going to add one more. And then let's add another source. Let's hit Apply.

So now we can see our two sources, but let's hide our so we have one source here and one source there on the two extremes of the of our dual heating area. So here at the sources, we're going to apply a Joule heating in terms of a current-voltage pair using our two sources.

So let's go apply the boundary conditions. So we go to Source 1. Let's pick Properties. And what we'd like to do is we're going to turn on Voltage-Current Source. And we'd like to put 25 amps here. So, update and Done. Let's go to our Source 2. Go to Properties.

This will be defined by voltage with 0 watts. So, update and Done. Next step is to generate the mesh. Before we generate the mesh, what we want to do is we want to generate a non-conformal assembly for the trace.

And since we're performing a Joule heating calculation, it is necessary to have high or medium mesh quality. So we're going to select Source 1, Source 2 in our trace block. And then do a right-click. We'll say Create Assembly.

So now these three components do lie in an assembly called Assembly 2. Let's double click on it. And go to the Meshing tab. We're going to select the option Mesh Separately. We're going to define some slack settings. Let's go to our Source 2. Right-click and select Match Elements.

Let's go to our Source 2. Let's go to our Source 1. And set the field level to 1. Go to Find Gradients, and let's add it to Smoothing. From our Source to ourselves. And we need just enter N1 for this Surface. And now we are working with our chunk.

Then we're going to assign some Mesh Control, and let's start to generate the gear. So what we are going to do is we are going to provide some Type Data here. Minimum Gaps Select Set Uniform Mesh Parameters and let's enable 2D Level Meshing. Let's press Done. So now we want to generate our mesh.

Where all right. Let's also change these minimum gap values just slightly. And then let's hit Generate Button. So this is going to go ahead and generate the mesh for us. And as you can see, it's working on it and it's already done around 350,000 our face up alignment is good.

Let's check our Skewness. That that's also over 2%. So that's good. If you like, we can you know display the mesh at different locations.

Maybe you know, make a cut plane through the X domain where we can see really fine mesh in the X direction where we have the mesh and then we can see the mesh and then we can see the mesh and then we have the traces. Okay. So we can close this.

Next step is you know, let's make sure our boundary conditions are correct. So let's check our Cabinet. We can look at the Opening Boundary Conditions. Okay. We have the Connection Flow. So I can cancel cancel. Let's go back up to our Problem Setup. Basic Pattern.

Let's go back up to our Problem Setup. Basic Pattern. Meters. And you know, we're going to solve for Flow Temperatures, Radiations off. We have zero Equation Turbulence. So that's good. We can hit Accept. Let's go to Solution Settings. Basic Settings.

So Flow Convergence is three orders of magnitude. Let's go 0. And if add more of Constant Woah that's teaching+, weland enough on sheet-level f. We can set 0 f now if we enter zero, it, you know, negative zero is our** for our .... limit f .... .... .... .... ...

termination criterion and residual criterion. And let's switch our Stabilization Method to BCGSTAB for Temperature and also for Joule Heating. And confirm that Precision is doubled. And we can hit Accept. So now what we can do is we can start the solution.

We're going to go ahead and click the Run Solution Button and then just hit Start Solution. And let's you know give the model time to be solved using ANSYS Fluid. So now looks like Fluent RAN completed. It reached Convergence around 110-15 iterations. Looks like it sent information back to Icepack.

Let's hit Done. Close this window. And we can already see some temperatures. So let's hide this cut. You know, let's look at our trace. So we want to go Post Object Face. Let's select our trace layer. Hit Accept. And then what we want to do is again look at the Temperature by clicking Parameters.

So let's select this object. And then hit Apply. So this is what our Temperature Field looks like for our Joule Heat due to the Joule Heating. We can see you know the higher and lower regions. Also, you know, remember that these are with the you know with the convecting boundary conditions.

Next, we may want to look at the Electric Potential. So from our list, let's select that. Hit Apply. And this is what our Electric Potential Solution looks like.

And this actually concludes our presentation where we went through you know modeling a Joule Trace Heating Problem on our PCB using ANSYS Icepack. Thank you for your interest. Have a great day. Bye. Thank you. Thank you.