Investigations on optimum thermal design solution by using thermal management for robust design of electronic components

Abstract

The enormous increase in cellular telephone usage has created demand, additional network capacity and bandwidth. Outdoor enclosures for housing electronic circuit boards are widely used in a variety of technologies including telecommunications, industrial and military applications. These enclosures protect the equipment against a wide variety of newlineenvironmental hazards, such as the sun, dust, moisture etc. As electronic components have newlinebecome more powerful and complex, thermal management has become a critical issue. The thermal management of an outdoor electronic enclosure with Ingress Protection (IP65) is quite challenging due to the additional thermal load from the sun and the requirement of having an air-sealed enclosure. It is essential to consider the effect of solar heating loads in the design process to compute the life expectancy of the electronic product. Hence the unit is designed to the maximum ambient temperature of 65°C. Thermal design plays a vital role in the field of telecommunication equipment product development, because of the steady, unabated increase in equipment power densities to satisfy the level of features, services, and performance demanded by customers. Proper thermal design contributes to the overall quality, functionality and reliability. In the present research work, thermal analysis is carried out for the Base TransceiverStation (BTS) which consists of system board, Printed Wired Board (PWB), Power board PWB, Base band board PWB and a plug-in unit (PIU). The physical dimensions of typical outdoor system (BTS) are approximately 422 x397x118mm and heat dissipation is around newline231 W.The electronic components are completely isolated from the outside ambient air in order to protect them from outdoor environment such as rain, humidity, dust and pollutants. The primary objective of the thermal design is to pack all the sub modules into a compact portable enclosure with effective cooling strategies.