Enhanced heat transfer for electronic devices operating inside enclosures

The authors outline an experimental study of temperature field for populated printed circuit cards activated inside pen and hermetic enclosures. The study of the heat transfer at the device level shows that the transfer phenomenon is dominated by the generation of the thermal plume around heated small bodies. The authors compare some simple methodologies that dissipate or extract energy from the thermal plume and investigate their effect in thermal transfer enhancement. Some practical recommendations for potential electronic equipment designers are made. For all the cases under study the final temperature can be expressed as a summation of the device adiabatic temperature and the adiabatic temperature rise. The adiabatic temperature rise is independent of the device position inside the array