Experimental and numerical investigation of thermal behavior of electronic boards inside an enclosure

In this study, experimental and numerical investigations of thermal behavior of an electronic board assembly under unsteady natural convection in an enclosure was performed. There are two electronic components placed on the electronics board. The assembly is placed on four legs, which stand over a heater plate. Numerical analyses were perfomed using conduction based FEM (Finite Element Method) and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). Solutions using CFD analyses take long times, especially for time dependent problems with natural convection. On the other hand, in conduction based FEM, the fluid within the system, in general air, is not modeled directly, and hence, solution accuracy may be affected negatively. In this study, the heat transfer coefficients that were used to define the convective heat transfer boundary conditions were corrected by taking the experimental results as a reference. Additionally, unknown analysis input parameters, thermal contact resistance between the components and the board and component power deration rate were determined again using experiment results. Using the corrected analysis model, thermal behavior of the electronic board was examined for 64 different scenarios. The results of the examination indicate that the temperature of the upper surface of the components were highly affected from the component power, whereas, the temperature of the bottom side of the board was highly affected from the heater plate temperature, although the point of interest is right across the component. For the cases when the initial temperature of the system is relatively high, the temperature values of the board and the components may increase, decrease, firstly decrease then increase and vice versa. These behaviors are related to the thermal resistance between the heat sources and points of interest. Moreover, CFD and FEM analyses were performed for five more different boundary conditions and experiments were performed for two of them. Then, the results were compared. According to the results, setting up the FEM analysis model properly, results close to the CFD analysis and experiment results can be obtained.