Advanced Thermal Solutions, Inc

89-27 Access Rd, Norwood, MA 02062, USA. Tel: 781-769-2800 Fax: 781-769-9979 www.qats.com

Modeling Natural Convection Cooled Enclosures With CFD

– The Right Practices

Prepared by:

Kevin He, Ph.D.

Senior Research Engineer
Kaveh Azar, Ph.D.
President and CEO
Advanced Thermal Solutions, Inc.
April 10, 2004
1. Introduction

Solving heat problems has taken on a crucial importance in the development of new
electronic devices. Verification of a component’s temperature helps extend a
component’s lifetime, prevents thermal damage and reduces thermal strain. In the past,
the priority in allocation of design space tended to be given to electronic design
convenience. Cooling solutions scarcely received consideration appropriate for such an
important element in the electronic system design. In cases where cooling problems are
identified after the prototype system is completed, it is practically impossible to make any
substantial modifications to the design, since it constitutes an integrated part of the
system’s basic structure. This means that it is essential to be able to estimate cooling
performance in the initial stage of electronic system development.

The evaluation of a design plan by CFD was acknowledged as having a strong impact on
the reduction of electronic product development cycle times and the limitation of the
extent of physical prototyping. However, relying on numerical predictions without
supporting experimental comparison remains an unreliable design strategy. In another
words, the predictive performance of a CFD tool needs to be assessed and validated
carefully.

Engineering interest in natural convection in geometrically complex enclosures has been

stimulated by applications involving natural convection cooling of electronic equipment.
A basic configuration for the study of the natural convection enclosure involves the
association of a chamber, which communicates with the surrounding environment
laterally through two openings on either side. Inside the enclosure is a PCB with eight
components at the locations interpreted from electronic layouts. To compare the
predictive accuracy of CFD, actual surface temperatures of these components were
measured when the system was positioned horizontally and vertically. The experimental
data were used to compare against results obtained from CFD simulations.

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2. Experiment
As part of the validation studies for the
numerical simulation, a sheet-metal enclosure,
0.048 inches thick with dimensions of
7.17x9.29x1.6 inches, was designed and built
for thermal evaluation. The design of the
enclosure and a photo of the experimental set-
up are shown in figure 1. The enclosure has
two openings so that air can flow freely from
inside to outside or vice versa.
7
3 8
1 2 4 5
The enclosure included a cover and bottom 6
piece; both assembled together with 6 sheet
metal screws. A 7x9x0.06 inch FR-4 board,
with two copper layers, one on the top, the Fig. 1 Design model of the mockup
system and the picture of eight mockup
other on the bottom, was used to fabricate the
components mounted on top of a FR4
PCB board. Eight key components identified board in the mockup enclosure.
Dimension in inches.
from electronic design were mocked up with 8
Aluminum blocks having the exactly the same
dimensions as those interpreted from the component data sheets, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Experimental simulation component dimension and power

Component Dimension Power
Name
Index W (mm) L (mm) H (mm) (W)
1 Converter 5.0 6.2 1.7 1.2
2 ADSL 1 10.0 10.0 1.6 0.8
3 ADSL 2 24.0 24.0 1.6 1.0
4 VPN 22.0 22.0 1.7 0.8
5 CPU 31.0 31.0 2.5 1.2
6 Ethernet 20.0 14.0 3.4 1.4
7 Memory 90.2 25.4 1.3 1.0
8 Regulator 5.0 6.2 1.7 1.2

The aluminum components were attached on the FR-4 board with thermally conductive
tape (Chomerics T412) to the locations obtained from the electrical layout. In between
the FR4 board and Aluminum mockup is a heater used to power up the mockups. A

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mockup board with components was assembled onto the bottom piece of the enclosure
with screws. Eight 30G J type thermocouples were attached to the top of the components
with thermal epoxy. The dimensions and power for each component is shown in Table 1.

During the temperature measurement, to ensure all experimental data were taken at a
steady state condition, temperatures were monitored continuously and recorded only after
no more than 0.5 ºC change during 5 min interval. Temperatures were measured for both
horizontal and vertical positions of the enclosure.

3. Simulation

Numerical analysis was undertaken using

CFDesign, version6.0, a powerful CFD
code used for the thermal analysis of
electronic products. CFDesign integrated
CFD simulation tools with some leading
parametric CAD systems, such as
Pro/Engineer, Solidworks, etc, greatly
facilitating the generation of model
geometries, especially complex ones. The
detailed numerical model for the unit was
Fig.2 Computational simulation model of
created with Pro/Engineer and shown in the unit, created with Pro/Engineering. Air
Fig. 2. Component size corresponds to volume was not shown in the figure.

vendor specified nominal dimensions.

Component material thermal physical properties are extracted from engineering books,
and assumed constant except for the buoyancy term of y direction momentum. A large air
volume, 70x90x20inch, was created to ensure minimal end effect. The air volume
surfaces, except for the bottom where an adiabatic boundary condition is assigned, are
prescribed at a constant temperature, 25°C. Radiation heat transfer was included in the
simulation by turning on the radiation function and assigning appropriate surface
emissivites, again extracted from engineering book. Convergence is determined by
checking the change of residuals and ensuring that they are small enough for all
variables.

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 Horizontal Horizontal
Horizontal Vertical

Fig. 3 Temperature profile of the PCB board and the components

in horizontal and vertical position.

4. Results and discussion

Figure 3 shows the temperature profile over the PCB card and the component
temperature for two positions obtained from numerical simulations. Table 2 compares the
measured top surface temperature of each component with the associated simulation
result. One average, the temperature difference between the experimental and simulation
data was remarkably small for most of components. For those components near to the
openings, measured temperatures tended to be lower than simulation results. That may be
because air was not perfectly still during the measurement and air circulation in the lab
may have induced air movement around the test unit.

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Table 2 Comparison of experimental and simulation results.
Component
Horizontal Vertical
Index
Temperature (°C) Temperature (°C)
Exp. Sim. Deviation Exp. Sim. Deviation
1 73.5 71.1 3.2% 69.7 74.2 -6.5%
2 61.5 60.1 2.3% 56.9 58.7 -3.2%
3 57.5 55.6 3.3% 52.2 53.6 -2.7%
4 59.3 56.0 5.5% 53.6 51.9 3.2%
5 58.1 60.0 -3.3% 52.5 52.5 0.0%
6 60.3 63.5 -5.4% 54.4 54.6 -0.4%
7 53.1 54.3 -2.3% 46.7 45.9 1.7%
8 73.3 81.6 -11.3% 67.1 70.3 -4.8%
Average Absolute Deviation 4.56% 2.79%

5. Conclusion

Natural convection problems in vertical and horizontal configurations pose very unique
and difficult-to-solve thermal problems in electronics packaging. The difficulty stems
from the local buoyancy cells created by the components and their interactions once
placed in an enclosure. Another challenge is the modeling of the enclosure in a proper
manner so the complex flows that are created within and outside the enclosure are indeed
captured. These flow structures that are highly coupled, directly impact the accuracy of
the results. In this study, it was shown that if the air surrounding the enclosure is assumed
a box with a dimension 10 times the enclosure, the results are much more accurately
aligned with the experimentation. The results obtained from this study clearly showed
that for this geometry and such modeling practice, accurate results can be obtained from
CFD. Although the difference between actual components and thermal mockups were
significant, nevertheless, the simulation of the existing system showed an excellent
agreement between experimentation and simulation. The accuracy of prediction can be
attributed to several points. These include: the robustness of the CFD solver, selection
of the correct material properties and the proper modeling practice that yielded the
accurate capture the airflow and heat transfer dynamics governing the cooling of the
enclosure.

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