Will your enclosure overheat? Does that heat sink actually work? SolidWorks Flow Simulation answers these questions on the computer, before you cut a single prototype.
Overview
SolidWorks Flow Simulation is computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software — it solves for how air or liquid actually moves through and around your geometry, and how heat conducts, convects, and radiates through the assembly. That's a different discipline from FEA (Finite Element Analysis), which handles structural stress and deflection. This service is specifically the flow and thermal side.
The most common reason to run this: you have an enclosure with heat-generating components inside and no way to know, without simulation, whether it'll overheat — or whether a heat sink design is actually adequate before committing to tooling or a production run.
Typical applications:
How It Works
Establish heat sources, power dissipation, ambient temperature, and airflow sources — fans or natural convection — matching real operating conditions.
Build an appropriate simulation mesh and configure material properties, contact resistances, and radiation where relevant.
Execute the simulation and interpret temperature distribution, hot spots, and airflow patterns against your targets.
Modify geometry — fin spacing, vent placement, fan selection — and re-run until thermal targets are met.
What You Get
Temperature distribution, hot-spot identification, and airflow visualization against your targets.
Specific geometry changes — fin count, spacing, vent size and placement — to hit thermal targets.
Updated design incorporating the thermal fixes, ready for prototyping.
A record of the assumptions used — power, ambient temperature, airflow — so results can be reproduced or updated later.
FAQ
FEA analyzes stress, deflection, and structural failure under load. Flow Simulation (CFD) analyzes fluid flow and heat transfer — temperature distribution, airflow, cooling performance. This service is specifically the flow and thermal side.
Simulation won't fully replace a final physical validation before mass production, but it lets you eliminate the geometries that clearly won't work and narrow down to a design worth actually prototyping, saving rounds of expensive physical iteration.
Power dissipation of heat sources in watts, ambient operating temperature, any known airflow sources like fans or vents, and the CAD model itself. If some of these aren't known yet, reasonable assumptions get documented and flagged.
Yes — Flow Simulation handles both gas and liquid flow, so liquid-cooled systems like cold plates and tubing loops are within scope as well as air-cooled electronics.
It depends on model complexity, how many design variants you want compared, and whether transient or advanced turbulence effects are needed. You'll get a fixed quote upfront — usually a fraction of the cost of iterating the same design in physical prototypes.