A recent article in Electronic Design noted that:
The number one thing engineers care about these days is time-to-market, or more aptly put, time-to-revenue. After all, companies are in business not to develop technology, but to make and sell products based on that technology.
Engineering is a wonderful mix of craft, science and business. We change lives (usually for the better) and make new things that open up whole worlds of opportunities for others. But getting things to market is just as much a part of the process as coming up with the next great idea. As engineers we love cool projects but as business people, optimizing the schedule (where it makes sense) to reduce time-to-revenue is important . There are a number of free on-line tools that can help with just that task.
ATS Heat Sink Selection Tool: This tool gives engineers a way to get a choice set of heat sinks for a given semiconductor. This method can shrink the time it takes to choose the right heat sink for validation in an engineer’s lab. Just click to the tool, choose a component family or type in a component’s part number, and the tool gives you a choice of heat sinks to jump-start an engineer’s design process. Click here to reach the heat sink selection tool
The National Institute of Standards and Technology: An excellent reference guides for fluid properties. This can be an excellent reference to reduce the time to look up such properties while doing any thermal design: NIST Fluids WebBook Reference.
University of Waterloo’s MHTL on-line simulation tools: Lots of great online tools for conductivity, fluid properties, heat sink calculations and more MHTL On-Line Simulation Tools.
coolingZONE’s Design Corner: Online calculators around impingement heat transfer, radiation shielding, heat sink fin optimized spacing and more coolingZONE Design Corner Calculators.
The Thermal Wizard: A list of interesting online calculation tools including units conversion, conduction calculators, head loss coefficients, The Thermal Wizard
CFD Online: CFD On-line maintains a list of on-line tools for CFD including air foil calculations, pipe flow calculations, power cycle analysis and more, CFD On-Line Tool List
Easy Calculation: They have a few simple tools that might be more approachable than at coolingZONE or University of Waterloo; Easy Engineering Calculation Tools
Arrow Electronics Lighting Designer: A free cloud based application platform to design LED lighting. Includes reference designs, thermal analysis tool, and simple menu based CAD tool. Arrow Electronics Lighting Designer
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