Heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays occupy all parts of space
— Jean Baptiste Fourier
As the above quote from Fourier, the famous 18th century scientist makes clear, heat is all around us - whether you’re cooking on a stove, taking a hot shower or cooling a home with an air conditioner. Incorporating thermal effects is critical to successfully designing products that meet performance standards and customer expectations.
That’s why we are thrilled to offer Conjugate Heat Transfer (CHT) simulation capabilities that expand beyond fluid flow, beginning our journey into making Luminary Cloud a multi-physics platform. With CHT, our customers can solve a new set of thermal management engineering problems for steady and transient applications by computing temperature distributions and offering more physical realism by coupling solids and fluids.
Growing applications for CHT
CHT treats the transfer of heat between solids and fluids as a unified, continuous system. This enables engineers to predict temperature distributions, heat fluxes and other thermal properties in order to optimize product design for durability and energy efficiency.
There are a massive number of applications for CHT simulations. A common example is the design of heat exchangers that transfer heat between two or more fluids, gases, or a combination of both to regulate temperatures. On the residential side, heat exchangers are used in refrigeration, air conditioning, and water heaters. On the industrial side, they’re used in power stations, chemical plants, food and beverage processing, and in data centers to control temperatures.
Thermal management systems are a critical area of research for automotive companies and their supplier networks, especially in the arena of EVs. You might have noticed how the range of an EV gets reduced in hot or cold weather. This is a function of increased energy draw for cabin comfort as well as battery temperature management, both of which are problems where CHT simulations can help.
With the recent generative AI boom, demand for data centers has dramatically increased. According to a McKinsey study, data center power consumption in the U.S. is projected to double between 2022 and 2030. This power draw is associated with a lot of generated heat that needs to be dissipated. Cooling these power hungry HPC instances efficiently requires new and innovative cooling technologies that can be tested virtually using CHT simulations.
How CHT works in Luminary Cloud
In the demo below, see how Luminary uses CHT to quickly and easily simulate a battery cooling cell from geometry setup, mesh, and simulation.
Why use Luminary Cloud
Now that we’ve established what CHT is and why it’s valuable, let’s explore why Luminary Cloud is the right choice for performing CHT simulations.
Robust meshing
In Conjugate Heat Transfer analysis, dealing with curved and angled geometries often presents a significant challenge. Luminary’s advanced meshing algorithms are specifically designed to handle these complex topologies efficiently. Unlike legacy tools that necessitate simplifying models and imposing restrictive assumptions, Luminary Cloud enables engineers to accurately model intricate geometries without compromising on the precision of results. For instance, in the design of heat exchangers, where the curved surfaces and finer details are crucial for characterizing performance, Luminary’s meshing capabilities ensure high-fidelity simulations, leading to more reliable and optimized designs.
Faster transient results
Simulating real-world phenomena often requires running transient simulations to capture dynamic behavior over time, which provides deeper insights than static, steady-state simulations. Traditional tools, limited by scalability and time constraints, often compel engineers to focus only on worst-case scenarios with idealized assumptions, risking inaccurate design considerations.
Luminary’s GPU-optimized solvers significantly accelerate transient simulations, achieving speeds up to 100x faster than legacy workflows. This allows for comprehensive design explorations in thermal cycling of electronic components, where rapid and repeated heat flux changes must be analyzed to predict performance and reliability under real operational conditions. This speed and accuracy translate into faster design iterations and more robust products.
As an example, one can visualize temperature distributions throughout the model, easily pinpoint hotspots, and isolate flow features contributing to those hotspots. This kind of insight can be gleaned in minutes with Luminary Cloud’s CHT solution versus several hours with traditional CHT solutions.
With Luminary, we know which ideas to pursue and which ideas not to pursue very quickly. We don’t spend months thinking about these problems.
— Gregor Veble Mikic, Joby Chief Aerodynamicist
Test many scenarios in parallel
Legacy simulation workflows are often bottlenecked by the number of available licenses, restricting the number of design scenarios engineers can test simultaneously. This limitation hinders thorough exploration and optimization. Luminary Cloud’s on-demand and consumption-based billing model eliminates these constraints, enabling engineers to run multiple scenarios in parallel.
Flighthouse values Luminary Cloud as a SaaS platform for project deconfliction. We have the ability to launch multiple projects without putting them into a queue or expanding on-prem capability,
— Cory Simpson, Flighthouse Aerospace Engineer
For example, in the automotive industry, optimizing the thermal management system of an electric vehicle requires testing various cooling strategies under different operating conditions. With Luminary, engineers can efficiently conduct these parallel simulations, leading to a more robust and energy-efficient design. This capability not only enhances productivity but also drives innovation by allowing for extensive exploration of the design space.
Conclusion
CHT simulation in Luminary streamlines the pre-processing phase with robust meshing, provides deeper insights with fast transient results and opens up the design space by testing many scenarios in parallel. This is the vision of Realtime Engineering that we have now brought to the CHT space. This unlocks new possibilities for innovation in products that we experience and benefit from every day.
To learn more about our CHT solution, read our documentation or check out this sample project.
