Heat management for power converters in sealed enclosures: A numerical study

This paper compares four assembly solutions for power converters operating in sealed enclosures with tight temperature specifications. The specific application of interest is one of the DC/DC converters of a power supply system to be used in high-energy-physics experiments: the sealed case must not significantly alter the temperature of the surrounding components (detectors and their electronics). The comparison is made using 3D Finite Element thermal modeling. The standard FR4 board solution is shown not to be viable under these tight temperature specs; we therefore explore alternative assemblies for the stack connecting the active devices to the heat-sink.