Thermal Analysis
Thermal AnalysisContinuing market requirements for higher speeds of operation have resulted in the advent of systems that exhibit dramatic increases in power dissipation compared to previous systems. For example, today’s 6U VPX boards typically dissipate 2 to 4 times the power as compared to VME. This is a key reason for performing a thorough thermal design for modern electronic systems.
Effective designs for chassis and boards with increasing heat dissipation requirements can be accomplished by careful attention to flow path management, areas of flow restrictions, circuit card selection and air mover selection. Solving thermal management problems up front in the design phase can prevent expensive changes later on.
Defense Solutions has extensive capabilities for advanced thermal/airflow modeling and simulation using industry standard CFD tools. Our capabilities range from detailed device package modeling to full system modeling for air-cooled, conduction-cooled, or liquid-cooled applications.
We offer thermal analysis services for our chassis solutions; typical enclosure styles include desk top, rack mount, ATR, and custom styles. These enclosure solutions support either air cooled modules or conduction cooled modules, with power dissipation ranging <10W per slot to >200W per slot.
These chassis solutions typically support either air cooled modules or conduction cooled modules, with slot counts ranging from 2 slots to 21 slots, and power ranging from 200W to >2000W, and rack level solutions often include multiple chassis. Applications range from demonstration units to hardware and software development platforms and environmental test platforms, for desk-top or rack-mount. Cooling types include baseplate conduction, forced air conduction, liquid conduction, forced air cooled, air-air heat exchanger, and liquid-air heat exchanger. Chassis bus structures typically include OpenVPX, VPX-REDI, VME64x, VXS, and CompactPCI as well as hybrid bus structures.
We specialize in providing custom chassis solutions. Please browse our website for a sampling of the enclosure solutions that we have developed for specific customer applications including standard and custom backplanes.
We use industry leading thermal analysis tools including:
- MacroFlow Flow Network Modeling for chassis, sizing and first order analysis
- Flomerics Flotherm for performing system to device level thermal analysis
- Cambridge Accesense multi-point temperature and airflow test equipment for overall and detailed testing