RadCAD: Integrating Radiation Analysis with Modern CAD Systems

The trend towards concurrent engineering requires that designers and engineers of all disciplines share a common engineering database. Incorporation of existing radiation solvers into the CAD environment has had limited success, chiefly due to the limited set of surface types that can be analyzed and the incompatibility with FEM generated meshes.

This paper describes RadCAD™, a new radiation analyzer integrated within the CAD environment. In addition to the basic set of conic surfaces, RadCAD also analyzes arbitrary free form surfaces and directly supports FEM meshes. The motivation, design approach, and algorithmic improvements for RadCAD are presented.