Convection Cooling of Circuit Boards

Application ID: 449


The suite of models examine the air cooling of circuit boards populated with multiple integrated circuits (ICs), which act as heat sources. Two possible cooling scenarios are depicted: vertically aligned boards using natural convection, and horizontal boards with forced convection (fan cooling). In this case, contributions caused by the induced (forced) flow of air dominate the cooling. To achieve high accuracy, the simulation models heat transport in combination with the fluid flow.

The example models the heat transfer of a circuit-board assembly using the Heat Transfer Module’s Conjugate Heat Transfer predefined multiphysics coupling. The modeled scenario is based on work published by A. Ortega.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: