Modelling, Thermal Design and Thermal Analysis of an Electronic Unit

Thermal design and thermal analysis is necessary to effectively and efficiently cool electronic components for its best operation. This cooling method is known as electronic cooling. In the present work a finned heat sink for Electronic Unit (EU) of an Air Vehicle (AV) has been designed using the empirical heat transfer correlations by considering natural convection and radiation heat transfer modes[1] for given heat load. The preliminary calculations indicated that plane surface was inadequate to dissipate the heat, thus necessitating fins to augment the heat dissipation to the ambient. Heat transfer calculations were carried out for finned surface to find out the maximum surface temperature, which is well below the maximum permissible temperature. Further fin space optimization has been made by using empirical correlation for given heat sink to bring down the surface temperature further below.3D modelling of all the parts of the electronic unit was carried out in SolidWorks2012.Using Flo.EFD software the CFD model is generated and analysed to obtain the total thermal mapping of the above electronic unit. The CFD results were used to validate the results obtained through the excel spread sheet program developed based on the empirical correlations available in the literature.