41% of thermal engineers don’t have the right hardware in place for thermal simulation

London, UK, 10 June 2021 – Almost half of thermal engineers (41%) say that they don’t have the right hardware in place for thermal simulation. That’s according to a new survey of thermal engineers in the electronics industry conducted by Future Facilities.

The survey, which polled 50 professional thermal engineers on their current simulation tool — including users of the top five simulation suite providers — also found that over a quarter (26%) of thermal engineers have been prevented from solving on more cores due to hardware limitations.

The Future Facilities research also examined the issue of hardware limitations across specific vertical sectors, including the automotive, IT, lighting and aerospace industries. It found that almost a fifth (18%) of thermal engineers working in the aerospace industry do not have the right hardware in place for thermal simulation, compared to 44% of those in the automotive sector.

To overcome this issue, Future Facilities recommends the adoption of cloud-based solving for the most complex thermal simulation tasks — something that the brand has been quick to offer as part of its 6SigmaET platform.

As Chris Aldham, Product Manager at 6SigmaET explains, “With any thermal simulation, significant computing power is required to solve the complex CFD equations used to calculate temperature and airflow. Traditionally, this has required a substantial up-front investment in high performance computing hardware — something that our research has shown isn’t sustainable for a lot of thermal engineers.

“With the electronics space rapidly evolving and designs become ever more complicated, it’s unacceptable that almost half of thermal engineers are restricted by not having the right hardware in place for thermal simulations.

“Engineers today need to be armed with the right thermal simulation tools — including those with cloud-based solving options — and components that can deliver accurate results. Advanced CFD softwares like 6SigmaET provide this type of cloud-based solving, giving engineers access to over 1,400 petaflops of computing power delivered via 30 data centres and over 8 million servers. This type of solving allows engineers to cut up-front investment costs and reduce solve times, regardless of their on-premise hardware.”