SURFACE RADIATION EXCHANGE IN MULTI-DIMENSIONAL ARRAYS OF ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS

In the present paper, the discrete ordinates method is used to simulate the thermal performance of 2-D and 3-D arrays of electronic components. The simulations include pure radiation as well as combined mechanisms of radiation and convection.
It is corroborated in the paper that in 2-D situations, and with air as the cooling medium, the best simulations are obtained when an equally spaced quadrature is used. Although no effort is made in the paper to minimize end effects in the 3-D geometries, experimental estimates with the level-odd symmetric quadrature indicate that the contribution of radiative transfer to the total heat transfer process is of the order of 33%.