Multiscale Thermal Modeling Methodology for Thermoelectrically Cooled Electronic Cabinets

Abstract

A multiscale thermal modeling methodology is reported for multienclosure electronic cabinets incorporating thermoelectric cooling. A multilayer compact model for a thermoelectric module is used in combination with a reduced-order fluid flow model for a single enclosure, constructed using proper orthogonal decomposition with a flux-matching technique. A reduction by an order of magnitude of 10⁵ in the degrees of freedom of the system, with an accuracy better than 92%, is achieved. An entire cabinet consisting of multiple enclosures is modeled by combining the compact subsystem models, with an estimation error of less than 10%.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge support for this research from the U.S. Office of Naval Research under Contract N00014-04-1-0335, monitored by Dr. Mark Spector.