Thermal Management of Handheld portable devices

Handheld portable products comprise a large portion of Motorola’s manufacturing business and represent one area where a Computational Fluid Dynamic (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software such as FLOTHERM can play a potentially important role in the design process. In this particular case study, Motorola chose a generic representative of its handheld products, for which experimental data already existed and thus could be compared to the results from the Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation. Results of this case and others performed by Motorola demonstrate the capability of FLOTHERM readily solved both internal and external fluid regions as well as the associated conduction problem. All available comparisons of simulated results were within 10% of experimental data, indicating that the tool will be a valuable asset in a design setting for predicting thermal performance.