Effect of heat source orientation on the thermal behavior of N-layer electronic board

Abstract

The present work completes a range of analytical solutions that deal with the steady-state temperature calculations of a multi-layered structure heated by a single or multiple heat sources. Today, the surface-mount devices onto a printed circuit board are not only oriented vertically or horizontally, various angles have henceforth to be considered in thermal simulation to assess new placement design. Thus the problematic of heating sources, having any rotation, is solved to enlarge the capability of conventional analytical approaches for modeling more efficiently the thermal behavior of recent electronic boards. To demonstrate its relevance, the proposed analytical solution has been compared to numerical simulations on the case of a multi-layered electronic board submitted to different configurations of heating sources.The comparison shows a good agreement between analytical and numerical calculations to predict the centroid or average temperatures. The promoted analytical approach establishes a kit of practical expressions, easy to implement, which would be cumulated, using superposition principle, to help electronic designer to early detect excessive temperatures of components or board beyond manufacturer limits. The ability to eliminate bad concept candidates with a minimum of setup, relevant assumptions and low computation time can be more easily achieved.