Coupled thermal-fluid-electrical simulation for printed circuit board design

In this work we describe a coupled thermal-fluid-electrical simulation for printed circuit boards and their surrounding enclosures. A finite-element based electrical solver is used to compute the distribution of electrical currents and ohmic power losses in the board´s power and ground distribution network. The power loss information is then used as an input to a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver. The CFD solver computes the resulting air flow velocities and temperature distribution in the board and its surroundings. The temperature map is then returned to the electrical solver, which adjusts the electrical conductivity as a function of position and computes an updated set of current and power losses. This procedure is iterated until it obtains a converged, self-consistent solution for the steady-state temperature and ohmic power loss distributions in the board-enclosure system.