Application of CFD Technology to electronic thermal management

Application of a Computational Fluids Dynamics (CFD) tool to the thermal modeling of free convection cooled handheld/portable products and component level products is assessed. The results of two case studies are reviewed. The first case focuses on a sealed, system level enclosure typical of portable consumer products; while the second case looks at a component level analysis of a sealed multichip module (MCM) package possessing an internal cavity. Temperatures predicted by the simulations are compared to available experimental data as a means of assessing the software's ability to adequately solve the coupled fluid dynamics/heat transfer problem. All simulation results were within 10% of experimental results for these two cases, indicating the software is readily capable of providing good thermal performance predictions.<>