An Optimized Thermal Analysis of Electronic Unit Used in Aircraft

Abstract

In a field where change and growth is inevitable, new electronic packaging problems continuously arise. Smaller, but more powerful devices are prone to overheating causing intermittent system failures, corrupted signals and outright system failure. Current study is focused on the analysis of the optimized working of electronic equipment from thermal point of view. In order to achieve the objective, an approach was developed for the thermal analysis of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) including the heat dissipation of its electronic components and then removal of the heat in a sophisticated manner by considering the conduction and convection modes of heat transfer. Mathematical modeling was carried out for a certain problem to address the thermal design, and then a program was developed in MATLAB for the solution of model by using Newton-Raphson method. The proposed unit is to be mounted on an aircraft having suspected thermal characteristics owing to abrupt changes in pressure and temperature as aircraft moves quickly from a lower altitude to higher altitude. In current study, dominant mode of heat transfer was conduction revealing that the major portion of heat transfer takes place by copper cladding and that heat conduction along the length of PCB can be improved enormously by using even thin layer of copper. The results confirmed that temperatures of all the electronic components were within derated values. Meanwhile, it was known that convection also plays a significant role in the reduction of temperatures of the components. The reduction in nodal temperature was in the range of 13 to 42 %. Furthermore, altitude variation from sea level to 15240 m (above sea level) caused the reduction in pressure from 1atm to 0.1095 atm. Consequently, the temperature of the electronic components increased from 73.25oC to 83.83oC for first node ‘a’, and from 66.04oC to 68.47oC for last node 'n' because of the decrease in the convective heat transfer coefficient.