A Visualization Tool for CFD Models of Convectively Cooled Printed Circuit Boards∗

An interactive tool for visualizing flow and temperature fields over models of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has been developed using AVS (Application Visualization System from AVS, Inc.). The visualization tool serves as a post-processor to control-volume finite-difference CFD codes used to simulate the convective heat transfer from the electronic devices on the PCB. Using the AVS application development environment we created a custom module to render solid objects and other physical features of the computational domain, in addition to the three dimensional field data. The custom module also provides information on the objects when the user selects them with the mouse. The end result is an interactive post-processing application that allows the user to query the objects embedded in the solution domain. In this paper we provide overviews of AVS, the PCBCAT analysis codes, and how the custom module allows interactive display of PCBCAT results. We also present a sample of output from the visualization system.