NewTRAFOLO Thermal — fluid dynamics and heat

CFD heat transfer, built for power electronics.

A finite-volume conjugate heat transfer solver that solves the solid and the fluid together. Put in the losses, get out component temperatures, air velocities and the margin you actually have left.

Conjugate heat transfer — natural convection
Conjugate heat transfer — natural convectionFinite volume, steady state
What it solves

Conduction, convection and radiation — in one solve.

Thermal management decides whether a converter meets its rating. Handbook heat-transfer coefficients cannot see the recirculation behind a fin stack or the shadowing between components; a 3D CFD solve can.

  • Conjugate heat transfer. Solid and fluid regions solved simultaneously with a consistent interface temperature and heat flux.
  • Natural and forced convection. Buoyancy-driven flow in sealed enclosures, or a specified inlet, fan curve or flow rate.
  • Surface-to-surface radiation. Set emissivity per boundary or per part — worth a few degrees on high-temperature assemblies.
  • Steady-state or transient. Thermal time constants, duty-cycle loading and thermal runaway checks.
  • Turbulence modelling. Models with wall treatment appropriate to the near-wall mesh.
  • Manual heat sources. Specify dissipated power per part or group — use a negative value for a heat sink.
  • Temperature-dependent properties. Conductivity and thermal properties that follow the solution rather than a single datasheet value.
How it works

Raw CAD in. Temperatures out.

A 148-part controller board, dropped in as exported, simplified automatically and solved in still air. No manual cleanup, no meshing expertise.

Your CAD, as exported

01 Your CAD, as exported

148 solids: connectors, pins, all of it.

Auto-simplified

02 Auto-simplified

43 thermal parts, -0.5% exposed area.

Solved

03 Solved

85 °C hotspot in still air at 20 °C.

Board geometry: Olimex ESP32-POE2, open-source hardware (CERN-OHL-v2-S).

Under the hood

A proven solver core behind an engineering-grade interface.

TRAFOLO Thermal runs a finite-volume CFD core with a long validation history across automotive, process and power engineering. You get that solver without the dictionary files.

  • Automatic meshing. Generate an initial mesh, then refine on selected volumes and faces where gradients matter.
  • GUI case setup. Boundary conditions, materials and heat sources assigned by picking geometry — no text dictionaries.
  • Parallel solve. Unlimited multi-core solving on a workstation or cluster.
  • Post-processing included. Fields, cut planes, probes and temperature reports.
  • On-premises. Models and results stay on your own machines.
Applications

Where engineers point it first.

01

Heat sinks and extrusions

Compare fin pitch, height and base thickness under the real flow regime instead of a catalogue thermal resistance.

02

Sealed enclosures

Buoyancy-driven internal flow with radiation to the housing — the case where handbook correlations fail most often.

03

Forced-air cooling

Fan placement, ducting and bypass. Find the components sitting in a dead zone before the thermal test does.

04

Potted and encapsulated magnetics

Resin, tape and interface layers as real solid regions, so the internal hot spot is resolved rather than assumed.

05

Cold plates and liquid loops

Channel geometry, flow rate and pressure drop against the temperature you need to hold at the die.

06

PCB assemblies

Board, copper layers and components as distinct solids, with the airflow around them resolved.

Two studies, one design

Build the model once, study it twice.

A magnetic component is an electromagnetic problem and a thermal problem at once. TRAFOLO gives each its own specialised application, so you can study the losses in one and the temperatures in the other.

Application 01 — Electromagnetics + heat
TRAFOLO Magnetics
3D finite element · transient & harmonic
  • Core and winding loss density
  • Temperature-dependent conductivity
  • Transient or harmonic excitation
Application 02 — Fluid dynamics + heat
TRAFOLO Thermal
Finite volume · steady & transient
  • Conjugate heat transfer, solid + fluid
  • Natural and forced convection
  • Surface-to-surface radiation

Both applications run fully on-premises — models and results stay on your machines.

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Licensing

Pricing on request.

TRAFOLO Thermal licensing is arranged individually — tell us about your team and use case and we will put a proposal together.

Free trial

Try it on your own part.

Install it, load your own CAD and run a case. Fill in the form and the download link is emailed to you immediately.

Minimum system requirements
Operating system
64-bit Windows 10 22H2 or newer
Processor
No special requirement — more cores shorten the solve
Memory
16 GB RAM or more
Storage
25 GB or more, preferably SSD
Graphics
No dedicated GPU needed — solving is CPU-only
Display
Full HD screen resolution (1920 × 1080)
Typical run time
About 1 hour with the Quick preset
TRAFOLO Thermal

Request your TRAFOLO Thermal trial

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