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SOLIDWORKS® Flow Simulation

CFD Without the Complexity — Inside SOLIDWORKS

Simulate airflow, liquid cooling, heat transfer, and pressure drop on your actual design model. No geometry export, no file conversion, no separate CFD tool to learn.

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30%
Faster design validation cycles after adopting simulation
0
File exports required — runs on your live design model
What It Is

SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation

CFD embedded directly inside SOLIDWORKS — simulate liquid and gas flows, heat transfer, and pressure distribution on your live design model with no geometry export, no format translation, and no separate CFD tool. Optional Electronics Cooling and HVAC modules extend the base product.

SOLIDWORKS Authorized Reseller Morphos 3D is an authorized SOLIDWORKS reseller. We help teams configure flow studies for thermal management and cooling validation.
SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation electronics enclosure thermal cut-away showing temperature distribution
Who this is for: Design engineers working on products where thermal performance, pressure drop, or airflow matters — electronics enclosures, fluid systems, HVAC components, cooling plates, heat exchangers, and pneumatic assemblies. You do not need a CFD specialist. You need a tool your engineers can actually use on their design, in their environment.
Choose Your Package

SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation Packages

Start with the base Flow Simulation product and add modules for specialized applications. All packages run inside SOLIDWORKS on your existing model.

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Flow Simulation
General CFD — The Core Product

Full range of liquid and gas flow simulation, heat transfer, and parametric optimization. Handles internal and external flow, rotating regions, free surfaces, and porous media.

  • Compressible and incompressible flow
  • Internal and external flow scenarios
  • Conjugate heat transfer (fluid-solid)
  • Gravity, rotation, and free surface effects
  • Parametric "what-if" optimization studies
  • Customizable engineering materials database
  • Results visualization and reporting tools
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HVAC Module
Add-On for Heating, Cooling, and Ventilation

Adds radiation, semitransparent materials, thermal comfort analysis, and tracer studies for occupied spaces.

  • All base Flow Simulation capabilities
  • Semitransparent material radiation modeling
  • Thermal comfort factor analysis
  • Tracer study for air quality and containment
  • HVAC component engineering database
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Electronics Cooling Module
Add-On for PCB and Enclosure Thermal Analysis

Component-level thermal models: Joule heating, heat pipes, thermoelectric coolers, two-resistor IC models, and PCB layer properties.

  • All base Flow Simulation capabilities
  • Heat pipes and thermal joints
  • Thermoelectric coolers (TEC) simulation
  • Two-resistor component models for ICs
  • Joule heating for conductors
  • PCB lay-up thermal modeling
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Available on Device Term License (machine-locked, 3-month or 1-year) or Single-User Subscription (person-tied, any device). Contact us to discuss which fits your shop.
Capabilities

What You Can Do with SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation

No Export Required
CFD on Your Live SOLIDWORKS Model

Run CFD on your live SOLIDWORKS model — same geometry, same interface. When the design changes, re-run, not re-build.

  • Fully embedded — no geometry export or translation
  • Uses SOLIDWORKS materials and configurations automatically
  • Same UI paradigms as SOLIDWORKS: toolbars, right-click menus, PropertyManager
  • Runs parametric studies on design configurations in one setup
  • Results appear as color-mapped plots directly on the 3D model
SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation jet velocity contour plot with blue gradient flow visualization
Why this matters: The most common reason design engineers skip CFD is friction — the time cost of getting geometry into a separate tool, setting it up, and interpreting results. Embedded CFD removes that friction. You run a study in the same session as your design work.
Electronics Module
PCB and Electronics Enclosure Thermal Analysis

Component-level thermal accuracy for PCBs and enclosures — two-resistor IC models, heat pipes, TEC simulation, Joule heating, and PCB layer thermal properties.

  • Two-resistor component models for IC packages
  • Heat pipe simulation including evaporator and condenser behavior
  • Thermoelectric cooler (Peltier device) modeling
  • Joule heating in copper traces and conductors
  • PCB lay-up thermal properties by layer
  • Thermal joint resistance between components and heatsinks
SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation electronics enclosure cut-away showing PCB thermal distribution
For electronics teams: Component-level thermal accuracy lets you optimize heatsink placement, airflow paths, and TEC sizing before you build boards. The SOLIDWORKS environment means your mechanical and electrical teams work on the same model without handoffs.
How Morphos Helps

Setting Up Flow Studies for Thermal and Cooling Validation

SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation is accessible, but setting up a valid study — one that actually predicts real-world behavior — requires understanding boundary conditions, mesh settings, and convergence criteria. We help your team get there faster.

Our focus is thermal management and cooling validation: electronics enclosures, cooling channel design, and heat transfer studies. We configure the study setup, validate boundary conditions against physical measurements where possible, and walk your engineers through interpreting results they can act on.

  • Study setup and boundary condition review for your application
  • Mesh refinement guidance for accuracy vs. solve time trade-offs
  • Training on results interpretation: reading plots, extracting values, generating reports
  • Module recommendation: base product vs. Electronics Cooling vs. HVAC
  • Ongoing support for new study types as your product line evolves
Our approach: We start with a real part from your product line — not a generic demo. You watch us set up a study on your geometry, define your boundary conditions, and walk through the results. By the end of the first session, your engineers understand what they are looking at and why. That is faster than any training course.
Common first studies we help set up:
  • ✓  Electronics enclosure natural and forced convection cooling
  • ✓  Cooling channel pressure drop and flow distribution
  • ✓  Heat exchanger effectiveness studies
  • ✓  Parametric studies comparing cooling fin geometries
  • ✓  Fan selection and airflow rate validation
Frequently Asked Questions

Common Questions About SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation

SOLIDWORKS Simulation is a structural analysis tool — it handles stress, displacement, vibration, and fatigue using finite element analysis (FEA). Flow Simulation is a fluid dynamics tool — it handles how liquids and gases move, heat up, and cool things down using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). They solve different physics. You can use them together: run a flow study to get temperature distributions, then pass those temperatures to Simulation as thermal loads for a structural study.
For most design-phase CFD problems — electronics cooling, HVAC, fluid system pressure drop, external aerodynamics at moderate speeds — Flow Simulation covers what design engineers need. It is not a replacement for dedicated CFD tools used by fluid dynamics specialists on highly complex problems (high-speed compressible flow, combustion, detailed turbulence modeling). But for the questions design teams actually ask — "will this cool adequately?" and "what is the pressure drop?" — it handles them efficiently inside the design environment.
It depends on model complexity and mesh refinement. A simple internal flow study on a cooling channel might converge in 10 to 30 minutes on a workstation. A detailed electronics enclosure with multiple components and finer mesh settings might take a few hours. Flow Simulation supports 2D studies for simpler geometries (much faster) and symmetry planes to halve or quarter the computational domain where applicable. We help you balance mesh resolution against solve time during setup.

More Questions

No. The base Flow Simulation product handles heat conduction, convection, and radiation. If your thermal study models heat sources as simple volumetric or surface heat loads, the base product is sufficient. The Electronics Cooling Module is needed when you require component-level accuracy: specific IC package models, heat pipe behavior, thermoelectric cooler simulation, or PCB layer-by-layer thermal properties. If you are analyzing an enclosure with generic heat sources, start with the base product.
Yes. Flow Simulation supports parametric studies that automatically run and compare multiple design scenarios. You define the input variables (fin height, channel width, fan speed, inlet temperature, etc.) and the output goals (maximum temperature, pressure drop, flow rate), and the solver evaluates all combinations. This is how you turn a single simulation into a design optimization tool — comparing dozens of variants without manually setting up each one.

Ready to run CFD on your SOLIDWORKS models?

We can walk you through a live demo on your geometry, help you choose the right package, and configure your first flow study during implementation.

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