Using Design Parameters with Ansys Icepak

Hello, in this video, I would like to introduce you to some of the basic design parametrization studies you can do using ANSYS IcePak. For this purpose, we're going to start with a simple model within our enclosure.

We have a heat source and then there's a heat sink on top of it and then there's a fan that sends forced air over the heat sink to extract the heat. For this particular problem, we have two options. One is for the heat sink. We can have a staggered or an inline design.

Let me show you what I mean by that. So let's align it like this. So right now, as you can see, we're seeing a staggered design. If I were to go to the staggered option, hide it, and then turn on our inline heat sink design, this is the inline heat sink option.

This is how the heat sink will look like. We're going to make a determination by running the two different geometries separately. We're going to compare the temperature field and decide which design is the better one. We will use a design variable.

In this particular case, this variable is going to be a checkbox. Meaning, it's going to be a name. It's going to be either staggered or inline. So it's not a numerical parameter, but it's a checkbox type parameter. Let's go ahead and define our parameter.

Let's go to our inline heat sink and click edit. We do want to activate or deactivate the assembly status. Let's do that. We'll call this heat sink. You'll notice that I've placed a dollar sign in front of it, which makes it a parameter. When you notice this turn green, it means it's parametrized.

Then let's say update. Now the heat sink 1, the inline, has moved under inactive. Let's do the similar to the staggered. Let's right click on active, then select a variable, and call this heat sink. Now the staggered is under inactive.

In the next step, we're going to set up our parameters and parametric runs. We're going to go to solve and now we're going to select run optimization, which is going to bring up the parameters and optimization panel. First, I'd like to click design variables and select heat sink.

Let's define a variable and then let's define a parameter and then let's define a base value of staggered and then discrete values of staggered and inline. Let's click apply. Now the values are saved. Now we want to go over to trials and we have staggered, inline, and then the mistyped one.

So I have a couple of options here. Let's go back. Fix this. Two Gs. Yes, hit apply. Now we have two cases to be run. Let's have this as ordered one and two. And also give this a restart ID. So that's good. Now what we want to do is define functions.

I'm going to click a new, a new primary function, which is going to bring up this panel. Let's give it a name of T-Max. This stands for maximum temperature. Okay. And let's pick maximum temperature of objects here and let's define our object and our object is the ZAR package. Let's hit accept.

Now we have defined our primary function. We can hit done and close this panel. For the next step, we're going to go do meshing. We're going to go to this button here, the mesh button, just click on it. It's going to bring up our mesh control panel. Let's select our mesh type to be mapped HD.

See under global, we want to mesh assembly separately. And we're going to keep all the element sizes as they're defined here. Let's hit close. For the time being, let's go ahead and define our problem. On the top of the panel, we see problem setup.

Let's expand it and click on double click on basic parameters. So our solution is going to have both flow and temperature. We do not care for the temperature of the object here. We do not care for radiation for this particular problem. Let's turn it off.

We'll keep turbulent flow because we have a fan. And because it's forced convection, not natural convection, we don't need to turn the gravity vector on. Then let's hit accept. Next, we're going to the solution settings and double click on basic settings.

We want to set the number of iterations to 300 and then we also want to set the energy convergence to 8e- 8. Let's hit accept. Let's also look at our advanced settings just in case. We see the defaults which are good for this case. We almost always want to solve double precision.

So let's make this double and then hit accept. It's always a very good idea to save your model before executing. So we're just going to go select save project. Also, we're going to go to the project settings tab and then we're going to dive into the material again and selecterta.

Then we tell him to just select the material as we need. So we can make it and you immediately get a notice that the material is now here. Then we just say there's a change. Now here's where we all need to let the Black Queen. We see the element and this is where we change the 백 zoo.

Just a moment. Let's navigate to the red label. How you would define a monitor point. The other one is essentially we want to look at the velocity. We want to look at the velocity at the xmax location, which is our exit. So we're going to be tracking this at every iteration.

And if we were to look at our package, we're tracking the temperature here. Now we're ready to execute our model. So we want to go solve and then go back to run optimization. Let's go back to the setup tab. So we want to make sure to do all combinations. Let's do view trials.

We can see our two trials here, inline and staggered. So that looks good because the geometry is changing. We cannot do a fast trial. So we're going to uncheck allow fast trials. Now that we're ready, we're just going to hit the run button.

So as the solution progresses, we, you know, we have our typical progress window on the top right corner. But also, we have our parametric trials window open, which is going to show us the progress as the cases are being executed. So let's take a look at the progress.

You know, what we can see is the staggered case is running. Convergence looks good. You know, everything is going down. About to be flattened out. We already have around maybe 15, 20 iterations. Monitors are converging well. And you know, we'll come back again as we have further progress.

Checking back with our simulation. The first simulation with staggered configuration is done. It took about 13 minutes of runtime on four processors. And we're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back.

We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. We're back. As you can see, the inline geometry is being run currently. So now we have our solution done. Looks like it's well converged. Looking at the monitors and the residuals.

We have our nice table with under the parametric trials shows us our runtime. But also, it shows the maximum temperature value. So for the staggered configuration, it's about 38.9 degrees Celsius versus inline, it's about a degree and a half, maybe lower, around 36.6 Celsius.

So clearly, you know, the inline design is working better. So we actually have our answer. So we can hit the done button and then we can dismiss the parametric trials information. An optional way to look at the solution may be to generate maybe a planar cut. Let's pick a planar cut.

We can take a plane through Z center. Let's look at contours of temperature. Hit apply. So this will be our inline solution where we can see the high to low temperatures with the peak where the heat is being generated.

Maybe another way to look at this is we can look at some vectors colored by velocity magnitude along this plane. So if we did that, we can see we have this fast flow near the fan as it shoots out. Then it's kind of a uniform flow around the object and the heat sink.

This concludes our presentation for today. Thank you so much for your interest. Bye. Bye.