Integrated thermal analysis of natural convection air cooled electronic enclosure

In the present paper, a methodology is described for the integrated thermal analysis of a laminar natural convection air cooled nonventilated electronic system. This approach is illustrated by modeling an enclosure with electronic components of different sizes mounted on a printed wiring board. First, a global model for the entire enclosure was developed using a finite volume computational fluid dynamics/heat transfer (CFD/CHT) approach on a coarse grid. Thermal information from the global model, in the form of board and component surface temperatures, local heat transfer coefficients and reference temperatures, and heat fluxes, was extracted These quantities were interpolated on a finer grid using bilinear interpolation and further employed in board and component level thermal analyses as various boundary condition combinations. Thus, thermal analyses at all levels were connected. The component investigated is a leadless ceramic chip carrier (LCCC). The integrated analysis approach was validated by comparing the results for a LCCC package with those obtained from detailed system level thermal analysis for the same package. Two preferred boundary condition combinations are suggested for component level thermal analysis.