Thermal Simulation of a 15U Telecoms Cabinet
Thermal Analysis of a 15U Telecoms Cabinet
In 2006 I began part-time study at the University of Bolton for their MSc in Electronic Product Development. The first module that I took was titled “Design For Thermal Issues” and, as the name suggests, was all about the thermal aspects of electronic design.
As part of the coursework, students were given the task of thermally optimising a 15U-high telecoms cabinet – the sort of thing you might see in the server room of a small company or institution. We were asked to look at several aspects of the design and determine how varying those aspects would affect the overall thermal behaviour of the system. Of course, it was not feasible to do this with an actual, real-life telecoms cabinet and so the main part of the investigation was carried out using the leading thermal simulation software package, FloTHERM.
By 2006 I was already a fairly experienced FloTHERM user, having been responsible for the introduction of the software at my employer’s site in Manchester. I had built up a good working relationship with the folks at Flomerics (who owned FloTHERM, later taken over by Mentor Graphics), and I had the good fortune to be loaned a fully working version of FloTHERM for use at home for the duration of the project.. I was, and remain, very grateful to my colleagues at Flomerics/Mentor for this extremely generous gesture.
Sections 5, 6 Initial modelling of the cabinet and results.
Sections 8 – 11 The effects of making various modifications to the cabinet design.
Thermal Analysis of a 15U Telecoms Cabinet Paper
As part of the coursework, students were given the task of thermally optimising a 15U-high telecoms cabinet – the sort of thing you might see in the server room of a small company or institution. We were asked to look at several aspects of the design and determine how varying those aspects would affect the overall thermal behaviour of the system. Of course, it was not feasible to do this with an actual, real-life telecoms cabinet and so the main part of the investigation was carried out using the leading thermal simulation software package, FloTHERM.
By 2006 I was already a fairly experienced FloTHERM user, having been responsible for the introduction of the software at my employer’s site in Manchester. I had built up a good working relationship with the folks at Flomerics (who owned FloTHERM, later taken over by Mentor Graphics), and I had the good fortune to be loaned a fully working version of FloTHERM for use at home for the duration of the project.. I was, and remain, very grateful to my colleagues at Flomerics/Mentor for this extremely generous gesture.
Having the luxury of the software running at home, I was able to dive very deeply into the optimisation of the cabinet design, often leaving the more complex simulations to run overnight. The result was a report that runs to just over 14,000 words. Due to my natural enthusiasm for the subject this never felt like hard work, and I’m sure I could have found more to write about given sufficient time! The length of the report, plus the necessity of including numerous tables, graphics, graphs and so on makes it near impossible to reproduce directly on this page. I have therefore converted the original Word document to pdf format, which may be downloaded via the link below. If you don’t want to wade through the whole report (and to be honest I wouldn’t blame you), then you might want to go straight to these Sections instead:
Section 2. Calculating airflow in the cabinet using an approximate manual method. Interesting in its own right, I thought.
Section 3. In-depth description of how to use FloTHERM. May be a little out of date now.
Sections 5, 6 Initial modelling of the cabinet and results.
Sections 8 – 11 The effects of making various modifications to the cabinet design.
Section 12 Modelling the influence of external factors on the cabinet thermal performance.
Here is the link to the pdf: