[sdiy] PCB heat simulations?

[Ian Fritz]

Not exactly what you are asking, but you could make a little chimney above 
your hot spot to move most of its heat away from the board.

Ian


At 03:08 AM 11/13/2013, Mattias Rickardsson wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>is there any good tool (or rules of thumb) when it comes to
>understanding the passive cooling airflow around PCBs?
>
>If I have a horizontally mounted PCB with some components that easily
>reach far above ambient temperature, how can I know if there is a
>convection going on above those components? If I knew that, I could
>choose to design the surrounding construction in a suitable way for
>the airflow - or if I knew that there is no convection I could skip
>those thoughts altogether and focus on other means of heat transfer.
>
>I googled a bit but never found a simple visualisation tool or other
>simple rule of thumb of these *very* un-simple physical phenomena.
>Given how complicated they are, I expect that a few advanced experts
>are the only ones that can come close to understanding them, but
>theory should have trickled down to some handy design rules after all
>these years. For instance, if one of my 1 cm * 1 cm components are 50
>degrees C and the rest of the PCB is at room temp, what happens with
>the air above it? What temperature difference (or power draw) is
>typically needed to give convection?
>
>Any pointers are welcome! :-)
>
>/mr
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