A Visualization Tool for CFD Models of Convectively Cooled Printed Circuit Boards

Gerald W. Recktenwald and Peter A. Gotseff
Mechanical Engineering Department
Portland State University
Portland, Oregon
gerry@me.pdx.edu

An interactive tool for visualizing flow and temperature fields over
models of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has been developed using AVS
(Application Visualization System from AVS, Inc.). The visualization
tool serves as a post-processor to control-volume finite-difference CFD
codes used to simulate the convective heat transfer from the electronic
devices on the PCB. Using the AVS application development environment
we created a custom module to render solid objects and other physical
features of the computational domain, in addition to the three
dimensional field data. The custom module also provides information on
the objects when the user selects them with the mouse.  The end result
is an interactive post-processing application that allows the user to
query the objects embedded in the solution domain. In this paper we
provide overviews of AVS, the PCBCAT analysis codes, and how the custom
module allows interactive display of PCBCAT results.  We also present
a sample of output from the visualization system.

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presented at the 1995 ASME National Heat Transfer Conference
Portland, Oregon, August 1995