Modelling the Enhancement to the Thermal Performance of Encapsulants using Thermally Conductive Filler Materials

Inhalt:
This paper investigates the thermal conductivity of composite encapsulant materials that are produced by adding thermally conductive filler materials to potting compounds. To this end, prototype inductors have been manufactured and potted using both standard epoxy, and a filler/epoxy composite. A number of composite samples were created from which bulk thermal properties were extracted allowing thermal performance of the inductors to be predicted. Furthermore, the experimentally measured bulk thermal properties are compared with values obtained from several analytical models. Comparisons were made between temperatures experimentally obtained from the prototypes and finite element analysis models. It is found that using the values predicted by the analytical models, as well as composite samples allow a finite element model to predict the performance of the component within 10 % accuracy.