Engineer – Flow & Thermal - Research & Development Engineering

What you’ll do:

The Modeling & Simulation Center of Excellence for ES Americas is seeking an Engineer – Thermal to support the design and development of electrical products, including switchgear, busway, switches, uninterruptible power supply systems, circuit protection devices, and related assemblies. The incumbent will develop and validate thermal and computational fluid dynamics models to predict temperature rise, airflow distribution, heat dissipation, and overall thermal performance.

The role requires close collaboration with product engineering, test, and global technical teams to understand design intent, define analysis requirements, interpret results, and provide practical design recommendations. The engineer will contribute to Eaton’s Analysis First strategy by independently executing moderately complex analyses involving conjugate heat transfer, airflow estimation, and electronics cooling, while delivering high-quality results within agreed project timelines.    

• Collaborate with product engineering and global stakeholders to translate design questions into clear flow and thermal analysis requirements.
• Perform CFD and thermal analyses for switchgear, busway, switches, UPS systems, circuit protection devices, and associated components and assemblies.
• Prepare geometry, generate computational meshes, define material properties, heat loads, boundary conditions, contacts, and appropriate solution controls.
• Evaluate natural and forced convection, conduction, radiation, conjugate heat transfer, pressure drop, airflow distribution, temperature rise, and electronics cooling as applicable.
• Review model assumptions and perform engineering checks to confirm that simulation results are physically reasonable and suitable for design decisions.
• Interpret and summarize analysis results, identify thermal risks, and provide technically sound design recommendations to local and global teams.
• Develop verification and validation plans, correlate simulation predictions with test data, document gaps, and improve model fidelity.
• Create clear technical reports and presentations that document inputs, assumptions, methods, results, conclusions, limitations, and recommendations.
• Support parametric studies, design optimization, and sensitivity assessments to improve product performance, reliability, cost, and development cycle time.
• Contribute to reusable simulation templates, best practices, automation scripts, and standard work that improve analysis speed, consistency, and repeatability.
• Participate in technical reviews and proactively communicate progress, dependencies, technical risks, and schedule risks.
• Follow applicable Eaton engineering practices, quality requirements, data-management expectations, and project-management processes.  

Qualifications:

Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, Thermal Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Applied Mechanics, Energy Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
0-2 Years of relevant academic, research, or industry experience in engineering analysis, simulation.

Skills:

Required:
• Strong fundamentals in heat transfer, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics.
• Understanding of CFD and thermal-analysis workflows, including geometry preparation, meshing, boundary conditions, solver setup, convergence assessment, post-processing, and result interpretation.
Preferred:
• Exposure to ANSYS Fluent, ANSYS Icepak, or equivalent CAE tools.
• Exposure to natural and forced convection, conjugate heat transfer, radiation, electronics cooling, and thermal management of electrical equipment.
• Basic scripting or automation experience using Python, MATLAB, VBA, or tool-specific scripting interfaces.
• Learning agility and curiosity to understand new engineering domains, tools, and methods.
• Structured problem-solving with attention to accuracy, quality, and detail.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical work and present results.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in multidisciplinary, multicultural, and geographically distributed teams.
• Ownership of assigned work, with proactive communication of progress, dependencies, and risks.
• Effective planning and prioritization to deliver agreed outcomes within project timelines.