Thermal Management in an IR Camera

Abstract: Progress in the miniaturization and performance in the development of electronic components along withthe increased heat dissipation as a result of this, forces companies in the industry to streamline the productdevelopment and its thermal design procedures. The rapid development of electronical equipmentrequires the company to conduct detailed risk assessment and comprehensive design calculations to assurethat the product’s reliability and requirements are up to thermal standard. To be able to keep up with theever-changing technology with increased heat dissipation, companies need to incorporate an effectivethermal design in their product development cycle. In this report, an outline is proposed to what acompany with an already established product development cycle can do to include thermal thinking intheir design of products. The project is carried out in correspondence with FLIR Systems at whosefacilities the project was conducted. The project goals were to present a thermal design process that thecompany could use as a guideline and later test this methodology on a product with known thermalchallenges. In the background research, it was discovered that a few, yet simple, steps had to be taken tobe able to effectively incorporate thermal design. This also included a selection of simulation software tosimulate the product in different stages of the development cycle to assess the thermal situation. Severalsoftwares were analyzed and two were picked out for further analysis; FloTHERM XT and SolidWorksFlow Simulation. The results show that these software effectively could simulate a model with adequateaccuracy to be used in decision-making, but could increase in accuracy if proper steps are taken beforeactual application.