Thermal Design and Cooling Performance Evaluation of Electronic Equipment Containing Power Electronic Devices

Abstract

In electronic equipment, thermal failure and thermal degradation are two increasingly prominent problems of the devices, with the deepening integration and growing power density. Currently, there are relatively few reports on the heat transfer mechanism, heat source analysis, and numerical simulation of electronic equipment containing power electronic devices (PEDs). Therefore, this paper carries out thermal design and evaluates the cooling performance of PED-containing electronic equipment. Firstly, the basic flow was given for the thermal design of PED-containing electronic equipment; the heat transfer mode of PEDs and the equipment were detailed, so was the principle of thermal design; the cooling principles were introduced for ventilation cooling, heat pipe cooling, and closed loop cooling. Then, numerical simulation was carried out on the solid and liquid state heat transfer of PEDs and the equipment under different cooling modes. Based on an engineering example, the cooling scheme was finalized through heat source analysis on the proposed electronic equipment. The experimental results rove the effectiveness of numerical simulation and electronic equipment cooling scheme. The results provide a reference for the cooling scheme design for other fields of thermal design.