"The stuff you engineers design is too good," the guy from Marketing said, "I need shoddier! Can you make them less efficient and cheaper?" I was working for a small company that made electric power conditioning equipment. Our devices protected against spikes, sags and brownouts in the AC power for mission-critical equipment like air traffic control radar and the computer … [Read more...]
Beyond the arrow plot – New methods for flow visualization
Within the realm of CFD-based flow analysis, the presentation of data is a vital issue. Researchers and developers need to gain insight, and non-technical managers and commercial staff have a critical need to understand the true ramifications of the data. Unfortunately, current methods for visualizing flow have limitations that make it difficult to interpret vast quantities of … [Read more...]
Thermal interface under a plastic quad flat pack
Introduction Plastic components are designed so that the heat is dissipated by forced or natural convection. The use of plastic packages under conditions where neither cooling method is available introduces new challenges. High heat-dissipation plastic packages require a large-area solid heat sink in order to transfer the heat into the copper thermal lands on the printed … [Read more...]
Thermal management of handheld telecommunication products
Introduction Recent advances in mobile communications have enabled large scale development of handheld telecommunication products. Such products include cellular phones, pagers, two-way radios, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other wireless and wireline equipment. The technological enhancements at device, package, and system levels have resulted in increased … [Read more...]
Experimental evaluation of the local convective heat transfer from configurations of wall-mounted cubes in a channel flow
Figure 1: Sketches of the measurement cube. Introduction Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes are frequently used as design tools to predict the thermal processes in electronic circuitry. CFD codes can easily cope with a high level of complexity (component, board and system levels) which makes them attractive to use. However, the thermal and kinematic complexity of the … [Read more...]
