Gerald W. Recktenwald
Presented at the 1995 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exhibition, 12-17 November 1995, San Francisco, CA.
Appears in Cooling and Thermal Design of Electronic Systems American Society of Mechanical Engineers, HTD-Vol. 313, EEP-Vol. 15, C. Amon (ed.), pp. 137-144.
The Printed Circuit Board Convection Analysis Tools (PCBCAT) are computer programs for predicting the thermal performance of convectively cooled printed circuit boards. The flow field is obtained by solving the depth-averaged (DA) momentum and continuity equations for the fluid layer above the electronic components. The two-dimensional DA velocity field data is then incorporated into a solution for the three-dimensional temperature field in the fluid and electronic components. By solving the conjugate heat transfer problem the need to specify a heat transfer coefficient is eliminated. By solving the DA flow equations instead of the three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations the computing time is reduced substantially. The physical problem to be analyzed is specified via commands in a plain text file which is parsed by the PCBCAT preprocessor. The commands allow the user to describe features of the calculation domain in a succinct, physically intuitive way. This paper provides an overview of the PCBCAT package from the user's perspective. The modeling capabilities of the PCBCAT are demonstrated with two example problems.
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