Thermal Analysis of Natural Convection Cooled Switch Mode Power Supplies

This paper describes an application example of thermal flow simulation to the design of a switch mode power supply (SMPS) that is natural convection air-cooled. In this analysis, the modeling of printed circuit board (PCB) and power semiconductor devices was examined using the design of experiments method. The PCB was treated as a simple plate, and average thermal conductivity was not considered. The power semiconductor devices were modeled as a simple hexahedral resistive network block. As the heat generation sources, a field effect transistor (FET) and a diode were considered in the simulation, and the calculation method of power loss is described. The difference between measured and calculated values for power semiconductor devices was found to be within approximately 10 K.