Pharma-Bio Simulation

 

I’m no CAE analyst – although I could play one on TV – but with a father in refrigeration, I’ve always been interested in the intricacies of heat flow and transfer.

Many of today’s important discoveries – life-saving drugs, vaccines, biotechnology-derived therapies – can be destroyed in transit by exposure to temperatures that are too hot or too cold. After investing heavily on R&D and production, pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare companies all face the same dilemma:

How can we protect our temperature-sensitive products and meet government regulations?

One of our CAE partners, MAYA Heat Transfer Technologies, tried to solve this for customers like Cold Chain Technologies (CCT). Their work with CCT is featured in the Winter 2009 edition of Pharma-Bio Transport on page 10-13.

Maya used NX Advanced Simulation – namely NX Flow and NX Thermal (PDFs) – for the simulation of CCT’s boxes. Their simulation results and digital validation provided a technological edge for this cold chain company.

From the article: “A computer program used during the modeling process lets the user pass through a number of required steps, including analysis selection, geometry creation, element selection, boundary condition application, and program execution….Comparison of simulation results and actual chamber test data has shown that CCT now has the capability to reliably model phase change of its refrigerants in a stagnant air (free convection) environment.”

I talked with Maya last October at the PLM Connection event in Europe. They were one of the early NX 6 adopters and have found synchronous technology to save a tremendous amount of design time in complex simulations like these temperature-sensitive boxes.