COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF NATURAL AND MIXED CONVECTION HEAT TRANSFER MODELS FOR CIRCUIT BOARD ARRAYS

A review of the currently available models and correlations for natural and mixed convection heat transfer in vertical, uniformly heated parallel plate channels is presented. These results have been widely used for the thermal analysis of arrays of printed circuit boards contained in typical microelectronics and telecommunications equipment. This chronological presentation will begin with the well known work of Elenbaas1 and describe the subsequent research for natural and mixed convection cooled isothermal and isoflux flat plate channels. All available heat transfer models will be presented and compared with numerical and empirical results from the current literature. In addition, the effects of many of the simplifying assumptions used in these models and correlations will be evaluated based on research presented by a number of authors.