Thermal Modeling of Snap-In Type Electrolytic Capacitors in Electronic Equipment

The electrolytic capacitor is one of the most important components for the thermal analysis of electronic equipment. To predict component and system temperatures, the thermal flow simulation technique has been applied to thermal design in the development phase of electronic equipment. In this study, we examined a compact modeling method for electrolytic capacitors in order to simulate thermal flow based on the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. To obtain fundamental data for the thermal modeling method, first, we conducted experiments to identify the major thermal path of electrolytic capacitors in actual electronic equipment by using a switch mode power supply unit. Next, to verify the validity of the thermal model, a benchmark experiment was conducted to obtain actual measurement data of the temperature rise of electrolytic capacitors under various operating conditions. The thermal model of the electrolytic capacitor was presented based on the CFD code, which is a commercially available thermal flow simulation tool. In this paper, we describe in particular the snap-in type electrolytic capacitor.