The launch of a complex, multi-circuit aerospace heat exchanger designed, simulated and validated within two weeks by composite mechanical component manufacturer Sintavia, has successfully denoted the acceleration of next-generation heat exchangers.

Sintavia in March announced that it had integrated AI computing company Nvidia’s RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition to design and validate a complex aerospace heat exchanger in two weeks – a process that typically takes months.

The resulting heat exchanger demonstrated a 30% reduction in weight and 20% improvement in thermal efficiency for aerospace applications and was validated using computed tomography scanning and in-house testing.

In Sintavia’s tests, Nvidia Blackwell graphics processing units ran a 30-million-cell Simcenter STAR-CCM+ conjugate heat transfer simulation with over 300 iterations in just seven minutes – 11 times faster than on a 24-core central processing unit.

The Simcenter STAR-CCM+ simulation is a comprehensive, proprietary simulation software developed by global technology leader Siemens and used for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and multiphysics simulations.

As part of the project, Sintavia adopted a simulation-driven approach, integrating CFD in Siemens Simcenter STAR-CCM+ software and implicit modelling from software company nTop, leveraging Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture to unlock “next-level” performance on what has historically been a large, compute- and memory-bandwidth-intensive workload.

By combining all of these features, Sintavia was able to rapidly iterate its simulation without sacrificing fidelity or safety.

Sintavia’s tests allow Sintavia to make near real-time adjustments to meet customer performance requirements.

The result was a fully optimised heat exchanger that was printable the next day.

“At Sintavia, we’re not just designing heat exchangers, we’re pioneering a new era of thermal management with solutions that are lighter, stronger and engineered for the most demanding environments,” said Sintavia principal design engineer Jose Troitino.

He added that because Sintavia operates in a fully digital environment – from simulation, through manufacturing and inspection – it is always looking at faster and more efficient solutions to reduce span time at each step.

“We are very proud of what we have been able to do so alongside Nvidia, Siemens and nTop,” concluded Troitino.