An Environment for Post-Processing Thermal Analysis Results

Typically the thermal engineer must consider a wide range of operating and non-operating conditions for a system and needs to understand how various features of the system impact on the overall thermal performance. The task of post-processing and analyzing all the results is often cumbersome and time consuming, usually involving a discrete set of software tools, with the results being manually compiled into a final report for communication to the project team and customer.

A new tool, ESATAN/ThermNV (Thermal Network Viewer), was released in 2004 to provide model validation and support some common post-processing tasks. The tool has been very significantly extended during 2005 with developments aimed mainly at strengthening the post-processing capabilities and semiautomation in the generation of analysis reports. As well as built-in post-processing capabilities for standard calculations, a very flexible system of user extensible “calculators” has been included. This paper examines some typical post-processing tasks and illustrates how ESATAN/ThermNV can be used to improve automation and save time.