Thermal Analysis of Compact Electronic Equipment With Cooling Fan

This paper describes thermal analysis of compact electronic equipment. A numerical analysis was carried out on the basis of thermal conduction treatment for the whole domain of a subnotebook personal computer with a cooling fan. In this work, numerical analysis based on finite volume method was employed to estimate the temperature distribution of the PC. To treat the air flow caused by the fan inside the cabinet, lump model was used in addition to the thermal conduction model. The numerical model includes Si chips, packages, printed wiring boards, casing, etc. Temperature rise of LSI packages obtained by the thermal analysis showed a good agreement with the measured values.