Design and analysis of thermal management for high-power-density converters in sealed enclosures

Abstract

The size of external AC/DC adapters and battery chargers used in today's portable electronic equipment, such as notebook computers and portable printers, continues to decrease, while their rated output power slowly but steadily increases. As a result of the increased power density of the state-of-the-art adapter/chargers, the thermal management of the generated heat has become one the of most challenging design tasks. In fact, to optimize thermal performance, improve product reliability and shorten design time, sophisticated thermal modeling is becoming an integral part of the design cycle. This paper discusses thermal-design considerations for high-power-density converters in sealed enclosures using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation approach. The thermal-design optimization guidelines obtained by simulations were verified on an experimental, high-power-density, 36 W, offline AC/DC notebook adapter.