Simulated and Experimental Thermal Analysis of Home Entertainment Server

This paper describes the simulated and experimental thermal analysis of a home entertainment server (home server). Heat dissipation per unit area in consumer electronics is set to increase tremendously with increasing product functions and the trend of slimmer, smaller and aesthetic looking in product design. This trend poses a challenge to thermal management of such products. To ensure good reliability and functionality, thermal design and thermal simulation for our home server have been carried out prior to prototyping. Simulated temperatures of two hard disk drives (HDDs), central processing unit (CPU) obtained from the thermal analysis are 38.4, 40.2 and 78.5degC respectively. Temperature measurement results show good agreement with simulated results with an average error of 10%. Both measurement and simulated results of HDDs and CPU fall within their recommended working temperature regime.