In engineering, systems often comprise multiple physical domains. If these domains have a strong interconnection, during the design phase attention should be paid to the interaction of these domains. A good tool for the research into the interaction of physical domains is modeling and simulation. Controllab has developed the modeling and simulation package 20-sim, which is suited very well for multi-physics simulations. With the development of this package, we have built up know how that is available for third parties.

All possible interactions between these domains can be simulated and represented by models.

At Océ Technologies B.V., for various reasons, research has been done into the heating of paper in a very short timespan One of the options was active method of heating with feedback of temperature sensors. Controllab was asked to make a virtual prototype, based on a physical model.

Controllab has created a 2-dimensional model that contains various layers. Every layer is a part of the heating process (heater, buffer, paper etc.) and can be tuned separately. The internal heat flows in the layers and the exchange of heat between the layers, were modeled by a grid of any size desired.

To easily set the parameters of the model, a front-end has been developed. The user only has to specify the key values of the heating process and the model is automatically created.