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 domain in a succinct, physically intuitive way. User-extensible libraries of material properties and electronic devices are provided to simplify the problem specification and to eliminate errors in creating the problem description file. No reference to node numbers or grid lines is required. Based on the descriptive commands in the user-generated text file, the preprocessor generates the grid and additional control variables used in the analysis. Output from PCBCAT analysis codes is in the form of plain text summaries and field data stored in Hierarchical Data Format (HDF). HDF is a standard that can be read by many commercial and public domain visualization packages.
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