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Company:	Hirschmann Automation & Control GmbH
Industry:	Manufacturing
Application:	Ethernet and Electronic Control Systems
MCAD System:	Solid Edge

Hirschmann Automation and Control GmbH offers a complete, integrated infrastructure for data communication throughout the customer enterprise. This respected global company is recognized for innovative, high-quality industrial Ethernet and electronic control systems such as their Octopus Series.

"Our managed IP67 switches from the Octopus series are waterproof and therefore, have no ventilation slots," explains Paul Eberling, managing design engineer at Hirschmann Automation and Control. "Heat dissipation must be ensured by radiation and natural convection around the housing exclusively." For products of the safety class IP 20/30/40, standards prescribe the possible widths of the ventilation slots.

To proactively assess temperature conditions in the Octopus series, Hirschmann engineers created and tested several digital prototypes using Solid Edge 3D CAD along with CAD-driven CFdesign upfront CFD software. Eberling says the typical six to ten weeks required for building and lab testing housing design options was cut to just one week using CFdesign.

At Hirschmann CFdesign is employed very early on in the product development process. A set of candidate designs are first created in Solid Edge and then each native 3D assembly is opened within CFdesign for rigorous flow and heat transfer simulations. A portfolio of interactive simulations results are then viewed within the CFdesign Design Review Center -- giving Hirschmann engineers a unique and highly insightful platform for critical decision-making. As a result, initial results about the thermal behavior of the system are obtained very quickly and much earlier in the process when the cost of changes is lower.

Paul Eberling and his team are currently developing a new housing design for the IP 20/30/40 safety class which was first introduced at the SPS/IPC/DRIVES 2007 conference and exposition in Nuremburg, Germany. It involves a modular housing system where the width of the housing is variable among other things. Using CFdesign, the engineers at Hirschmann were quickly able to determine the size of the housing and necessary heat sinks for the specified heat loss. The review of the results for the behavior when enlarging the housing by 30mm with the same electronics on a prototype yielded a deviation of 2-3% to the results from CFdesign.

Above all, the engineers at Hirschmann Automation and Control value the intuitive user interface of CFdesign with its checklist input options for material and loss parameters, even making it easy for employees who rarely use CFdesign to carry out analyses very quickly and safely. The automatic finite element meshing rounds out the package. "The price/performance ratio of CFdesign is right in line," explains Paul Eberling. "we are also very satisfied with the competent and prompt customer support services we receive."