air flow simulation and possible cooling effects

[cekuhnen]

Can Fusion Sim calculate / simulate a vortex effect of a fan and see how inside a housing this would affect cooling and air flow?

[Anonymous]

I was just looking into CFD capabilities in Fusion 360 Simulation and there does not appear to be any.  Just a few moments ago I voted for a CFD package to be added in the Idea station.  With a CFD tool I am not sure how you accomplish this within the Fusion environment.  Its actually a multi-physics requirement but most CFD tools I have used also perform thermal FEA.

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

There are air tunnel apps (flow etc) but they mainly I think work with static mesh.

In my case blades would spin and would have to thus adjust the airflow. Thats adds an extra problem.

Technically speaking the air is compressed and acculturated.

[Andrew.Sartorelli]

Hi @cekuhnen,

Fusion 360 doesn't currently have any built-in CFD capabilities. The wind tunnel app I think you are alluding to, Autodesk Flow Design, is meant only for preliminary external flow analysis. To do a more indepth CFD analysis you would need to use Autodesk CFD. It sounds like you are trying to do a cooling analysis of some kind of electronics packaging, if so we've got a short 15 minute video on using Autodesk CFD for Electronics Cooling and tutorial on electronics cooling that might be of interest to you. Feel free to stop by the Autodesk CFD forum if you have any questions!

Regards,

Andrew
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[cekuhnen]

@Andrew.Sartorelli

Thank you for your reply and yes I will contact you. What is your AD email?

[Andrew.Sartorelli]

Hi @cekuhnen,

I'm actually not the most skilled in CFD, my focus is supporting Autodesk's structural FEA tools like Simulation Mechanical, Nastran, Nastran In-CAD, and now a bit of Fusion Sim. The best place to ask for guidance on CFD is over in the CFD forum, the community and Autodesk support team are quite active there. If you don't have any background in CFD, the best jumping off point to build your knowledge is probably going to be the CFD Design Academy curriculum.

Regards,

Andrew

[cekuhnen]

@Andrew.Sartorelli

Yeah I know zero to nothing about it 😉

Thank you for the links - will explore them.

[Andrew.Sartorelli]

No worries we're all learning new skills, myself being a FEA guy I'm slowly learning CAD modeling in Fusion. The good news for you is the CFD help and the new design academy curriculum are really great for new starters. You may however need to dust off those college textbooks to remember the underlying math and physics 😄

Andrew