New approach to the mathematical modeling of thermal regimes for electronic equipment

Abstract

A mathematical model is constructed for simulating thermal regimes of typical electronic building blocks. It describes convective heat transfer in an air-filled cavity having finitely thick heat-conducting walls and containing a heat source. On this basis, flow patterns, temperature fields, and vorticity-vector fields are computed that characterize the convective heat transfer over a range of natural-convection parameters found in practice. Nonstationarity is shown to be a determinant of thermal regimes attained by the system. Computational relations are derived representing the variation of the average Nusselt number with the Grashof number for the boundary of the cavity.