Convergence and Validation in ParaPower: A Design Tool for Phase Change Materials in Electronics Packaging

摘要

Integration of solid-liquid phase change materials (PCMs) into electronics packaging has demonstrated the potential to reduce the transient temperature rise of components that experience pulsed thermal loads. However, the impact on local temperature histories resulting from incorporating PCMs in different locations and configurations within an electronics package is not easy to analytically determine, due in large part to the non-linear response of PCMs to a transient heat load. ParaPower is a new parametric design tool to facilitate the design of electronics packages. The tool has the capability of easily incorporating arbitrarily located PCM volumes and evaluating their effect on temperature distributions within the electronics package as a function of time. This paper determines the spatial and temporal order of convergence for the reduced order phase-change thermal model which underlies ParaPower. The results are compared and validated against both an analytical solution and a higher-fidelity commercial finite element analysis (FEA) tool. This paper has shown the fast-solving methods used in the ParaPower tool give results with comparable accuracy to those obtained using high-fidelity commercial software. Reasonably good accuracy can be obtained with fairly large time steps and grid spacing allowing fast-solving design space exploration with this option to increase fidelity within the tool to obtain higher accuracy when necessary. This research quantifies the trade-off between time steps, grid size, and accuracy such that a useful balance can be obtained. Design tools, such as ParaPower, have the potential to significantly advance design theory to reduce size and cost as well as minimize the prevalence of overdesign.