Uniform Cooling Air Flow During Computer Maintenance and Operation.

Many designs have recently evolved for cooling digital equipments. The Sylvania Waltham Laboratories, in building the Universal Digital Operational Flight Trainer, UDOFT, has developed a cooling method applicable to many systems. Every designer is faced with the dilemma of obtaining an optimum balance between ease of testing finished equipment and ease of construction testing of the first engineering system. In the cooling plan used in UDOFT, both types of test work as well as system operation maintenance can be accomplished without disturbing the air-flow path over the many small plug-in packages which contain the computer circuitry. Any package, or all packages, can be removed from their respective slots and all remaining packages will still receive the same constant air supply. This is accomplished without any moving flow-control devices and without gasketing seals. The hot-spot temperature of the electron tubes and other heat sensitive parts is controlled by maintaining a known, fixed air flow through each individual package. This arrangement provides optimum thermal control of the system, thereby improving both component and total system reliability.