COMSOL® APP for the Thermal Simulation of an Electronics Assembly Including TEC
This abstract describes a COMSOL® App that has been created to perform thermal simulations of an electronics assembly. The assembly comprises fourteen components including a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA), a thermoelectric cooling (TEC) Peltier module and a thermistor. The assembly also contains a proportional integral derivative (PID) temperature controller targeting the thermistor.
This abstract is not concerned with the details of the assembly, but rather with the details of the actual App. The App is user-friendly, self-explanatory, well-structured, aesthetic, inclusive of sufficient input and output features, and sufficiently accurate.
The App has an instructions page which presents a summary of the features. This App includes the following features:
- The "Thermal Conductivity", "Mass Density" and "Heat Capacity" pages allow the user to modify the default properties of each component in the assembly
- The "Control Parameters" page will allow you to modify the target temperature; PID constants; maximum TEC power, current and voltage; and simulation time
- There is a button to compute a new analysis with the user-defined inputs
- The App has a range of predefined results for analysis
