structural:reformatting
Numerical methods

In industry, thermal analyses are often ignored in the design process or performed too late — when design changes are limited and become too costly. Of the three methods mentioned in this article, theoretical and numerical methods can be used to determine an estimate of the heat sink or component temperatures of products before a physical model has been made. A theoretical model is normally used as a first order estimate. Online heat sink calculators can provide a reasonable estimate of forced and natural convection heat sink performance based on a combination of theoretical and empirically derived correlations. Numerical methods or computational fluid dynamics (CFD) provide a qualitative (and sometimes even quantitative) prediction of fluid flows. What this means is that it will give a visual or post-processed result of a simulation, like the images in figures 16 and 17, and the CFD animations in figure 18 and 19, but the quantitative or absolute accuracy of the result is sensitive to the inclusion and accuracy of the appropriate parameters.