ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF RADIATIVE COOLING IN ELECTRONIC PACKAGING

Abstract

Convective cooling has received, so far, more attention than any other cooling mechanism that could be associated with the problem of electronic packaging. This is particularly interesting since the few publications where radiation has been considered show, consistently, that radiative cooling could account for 30-50 % of the total heat transfer. In the present paper, the Discrete Ordinates method is combined with a control volume approach to simulate the thermal performance of several arrays of electronic components in situations selected to emphasize the importance of the radiation effect. The simulations include radiation combined with pure natural and pure forced convection, as well as radiation combined with mixed convection. In particular, it is demonstrated that in some applications radiation cooling can be orders of magnitude higher than convection cooling. Simultaneously, it is demonstrated that the maximum temperature of electronic components can not be correctly estimated if radiation effects are not accounted for.