Preserving the film coefficient as a parameter in the compact thermal model for fast electrothermal simulation

Compact thermal models are often used during joint electrothermal simulation of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and circuits. Formal model reduction allows generation of compact thermal models automatically from high-dimensional finite-element models. Unfortunately, it requires fixing a film coefficient employed to describe the convection boundary conditions. As a result, compact models produced by model reduction do not comply with the requirements of being boundary condition independent. In the present paper, the authors suggest an approach of successive series expansion with respect to the film coefficient as well as to the frequency during model reduction that allows to overcome the problem and keep the film coefficient as a symbolic parameter in the reduced model. The approach is justified with a numerical example of electrothermal simulation of a microthruster unit.