DOI: 10.1615/ICHMT.2008.CHT
ISBN Print: 978-1-56700-253-9
ISSN: 2578-5486
NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THE NATURAL CONVECTIVE FLOW FOR ELECTRONICS PACKAGING APPLICATION
ABSTRAKT
Electronic devices in passenger cars are often located in sealed compartment, where a free convective air flow develops depending on wall temperatures. To determine the transient temperature of electronics, the convective heat transfer is computed with a CFD code and transferred to a FEM code. The accuracy of a steady-state approach for the prediction of the convective heat transfer in case of natural convection is investigated in this paper. In a first part is shown that the numerical model proposed here is able to reproduce the structure of the flow resulting from instabilities introduced with appropriate initializations. In a second part, the heat transfer is evaluated in a cubical cavity for Rayleigh numbers in the range 104−107. With adapted meshes, the Nusselt number is predicted within 4% for a horizontal cavity and within 2% for a 45° inclined cavity in comparison with numerical and experimental results from the literature.