CFD Modeling of Forced Cooling of Computer Chassis

Abstract In this study, Computational Fluid Dynamics, which has taken its position in the thermal design of electronic packages, was used in order to draw a CFD road map for forced cooling conjugate heat transfer analyses in heat generating electronic systems. The main sources of error in CFD analyses arise from inappropriate numerical models including turbulence models, radiation modeling and discretization schemes, insufficient grid resolution, and lack of convergence. A complete computer chassis model with heat sinks and fans inside was created and parametric analyses were performed to compare the effects of different turbulence models, discretization schemes, mesh resolutions, convergence criteria, and radiative heat transfer. Two commercially available CFD software packages were used, ANSYS Icepak for preprocessing and FLUENT for solution and postprocessing. The road map was applied to three different heat sinks modeled into the full chassis. Numerical results were compared with the available experimental data and they were in good agreement.

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