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October 2015 • The PCB Design Magazine 67 article ANALYzING CONDENSATION AND EVAPORATION IN HEADLIGHTS WITH THERMAL SIMuLATION Vapor condensation and evaporation on a headlight's surface is crucial to its operation, and today's CFD tools allow thermal analysis of the headlight's design to be done in days, rather than weeks, helping to shorten the time from concept to production. The ability to account for the change of a film's thermal state and thickness caused by the heat exchange with the external fluid flow and the solid body, surface evaporation/condensation, melting/crystalliza - tion within the film volume, and motion caused by gravitation and friction forces from outer flow is particularly useful. PCBDESIGN References 1. G. Dumnov, A. Ivanov, A. Muslaev, M. Popov, and J. Christopher Watson, "Evaluating Water Film and Radiation Modeling Technolo- gies in CFD for Automotive Lighting," NAFEMS NWS World Congress 2015, 21–24 June, San Di- ego, California. Figure 7: The thermal simulation also shows the movement of the condensation film caused by gravity. Boris Marovic is industry Man- ager for Aerospace and Defense in the Mentor graphics Mechan- ical Analysis Division, Frankfurt, germany. he is responsible for future product enhancements and requirements as well as customer relations and marketing activities for the aerospace and defense industries. John Wilson is a technical marketing engineer at Men- tor graphics Corporation. he received his BS and MS in Me- chanical engineering from the university of Colorado at Den- ver. Since joining the company in 1999, he has worked on or managed more than 100 thermal and airflow design projects. lithium-air batteries could be the next big thing, if it wasn't for their very short lifetime. But an eu-funded project has doubled it. Since they were first commercialised in 1991, lithium-ion batteries have come a long way. But as the machines they power become greedier, engineers have had to start looking into alter- natives with a higher storage capac- ity. One of these alternatives resides in lithium-air (li-air) technology— batteries consisting of metal-based anode and air-cathode which constantly extract oxygen from the ambient air. "The main advantage of a lithium-air battery is its high energy density, which is theoretically 10 times higher than that of lithium-ion batter- ies," explains Professor Qiuping Chen, associate Professor at the Polytechnic university of Turin and coordinator of the STABle project. STABle's objective: increasing this capacity from 50 to 100-150 cycles and demonstrating this breakthrough in functional cells within three years. "The project is a complete success in this regard, with a life that has reached 151 cycles," enthuses Chen. Energy Out of Thin Air