From Thermal Complexity to Real-World Confidence
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
Thermal management is central to nearly every engineered system, from vehicles and aircraft to data centers, industrial equipment, and consumer electronics. As performance and efficiency targets become increasingly aggressive, thermal systems demand more integrated models, often incorporating other subsystems and advanced controls, to predict behavior before hardware exists.
GT-SUITE gives thermal engineers a single physics-based platform spanning the entire development cycle, from early concept through late-stage validation and product-in-use. Components scale seamlessly from 0D to 3D within one model, delivering fidelity-on-demand that accelerates innovation. Fast simulation speeds enable rapid design exploration and real-time X-in-the-Loop deployment, while physics-based solvers can optionally integrate with data-driven metamodels for even faster runtimes.
APPLICATION HIGHLIGHTS
Solvers, libraries, and workflows validated over decades deliver real-time capable, high-fidelity multi-physics simulation.
GT-SUITE uniquely offers the ability to scale individual components from 0D all the way to 3D in a single system model. This fidelity-on-demand brings higher resolution only where it is needed while maintaining fast run times capable needed for transients and deployment to MiL, SiL or HiL.
Advanced Features
A single environment spanning every level of detail, from standalone component checks to fully integrated system models, adaptable to diverse workflows, expertise levels, and industries.
Multiple interacting subsystems, such as thermal, fluid, and electrical circuits, can be coupled within a single multi-physics environment to capture their combined behavior. This supports development of physics-based control logic and energy-management strategies validated across realistic operating conditions, applicable across a wide range of industries.
Dedicated, highly flexible templates (tube-fin, microchannel, brazed plate, coil, shell tube, and more) enable prediction of performance from geometry and built-in correlations. If performance data is available, correlation coefficients can be automatically optimized. These fast, high-fidelity models enable accurate extrapolation, scaling, changing the working fluid, frosting, humidity handling, and more. Custom circuiting is easily specified directly in the UI.
For heat exchanger and refrigerant applications, standalone assessment tools are available alongside standard modelling and simulation, offering a faster, more streamlined workflow. These tools guide engineers through sizing, swapping, and benchmarking components with less setup, making them especially useful for those newer to simulation.
Native design-of-experiments and optimization routines allow systematic exploration of component geometry, control set points, and operating conditions to meet thermal and energy targets. These studies run within the same environment as the system model, avoiding data transfer overhead across separate optimization tools.
Localized, high resolution heat rates from key components (batteries, electronics, e-motors, engines and more) can be predicted by GT’s detailed physics-based component models and directly linked to lumped thermal mass or finite element models.
Finite-element-based thermal models can resolve detailed temperature distributions and heat flow within individual components, capturing localized effects that reduced-order models miss. These component-level models can be coupled directly into system-level simulations, linking detailed physics to integrated thermal and energy predictions.
Detailed 1D/3D thermal-fluid models can be systematically reduced to lower-order representations while preserving key performance metrics. This yields real-time-capable models suitable for control development and X-in-the-Loop (MiL, SiL, and HiL) work, without sacrificing the fidelity needed for accurate system-level predictions.
Thermal and control models can be co-simulated with third-party control software or exported as standardized functional mock-up units (FMU), supporting integration with common real-time and Hardware-in-the-Loop platforms. This allows control strategies to be validated progressively, from early Model-in-the-Loop testing through to Software-in-the-Loop and hardware benches. GT’s robust, stable solver is critical to enabling this.
Learn More
Explore the resources below to learn more about this solution, including technical papers, case studies, and application notes.
