Feasibility study of modelling a virtual climate chamber with CFD

Sammanfattning: The company tests their industrial tools in a climate chamber to assure that tools meet the ISO-standard requirements and to assure personnel safety. Since it takes time to prepare the physical tool and to get a time slot to test it, this process was a bottleneck. Especially interesting is the temperature testing process, and the question of whether or not the entire tool actually reaches the reference temperature within a time interval has been asked. This is the master thesis project’s core. The time it takes for the entire tool to reach a uniform temperature distribution is called thermal soak time and was unknown at the beginning of the project. The aim was to find the thermal soak time, both for the climate chamber and for a virtual CFD-model of the climate chamber. A simulation model was done in the software Altair HyperMesh and validated with experimental data from the climate chamber on site. The result of the experiments of the climate chamber showed the impact of all the unknown parameters and contributed to the feasibility study. Temperature cycles were run in the climate chamber to get thermal soak times for increase runs and decrease runs. This resulted in an understanding of how the climate cham- ber works and its limitations. As for the CFD-model, the simulation model of the climate chamber showed promising results of achieving a thermal soak time for all of the components of the tool. However, there are some limitations to consider when performing simulations in the specified software and with the CFD-model. In conclusion, the thermal soak time for the best-case scenario with aluminum is determined to be approxi- mately three minutes whilst, for the worst-case scenario, the same time is inconclusive since the simulation did not reach steady state due to time limitation of the project. However, the feasibility study of the climate chamber is complete, and proof of concept is confirmed for transforming a physical climate chamber into a virtual climate chamber. Further studies need to be executed to achieve a robust CFD-model of a virtual climate chamber.