Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Determining heat dissipation of 3D printed box - final results!
HendriXML:
I really dislike fan-noise, when choosing products that is for me a criteria that's high on the list.
Maybe that's why I like aluminum boxes, those extruded ones aren't that expensive. (But won't be very great in dissipation either)
Having noisy fans as a first option make product designers lazy. Especially in psu's, awg's and scopes.
I would gladly pay 30 euro more for near silence. That should be in most cases more than enough for better solutions.
DaJMasta:
For dissipation in aluminum chassis, the trick is to bolt the device to the chassis (with a silpad/insulating hardware when appropriate). Aluminum conducts heat well, so if you can transfer it to the chassis, you get much of the surface area of the box as your effective dissipation surface. You can probably get similar or better performance with good coupling to an aluminum chassis as you could with slots in a 3d printed chassis with no forced air provided the boxes were similar size.
HendriXML:
Sure, the slots seem not to work very well.
Aluminum will perform much better indeed, but I dare not say how much better.
Having a 70 deg alu box, is not completely user friendly (it also transfers heat fast to skin), so bolting stuff directly to it is in many instances not necessary if lets say max 50 deg case temperature is a constraint.
Conrad Hoffman:
The heat has to dissipate somewhere. Remember that if you have a 5 watt heater inside a sealed aluminum box, the box will come to the same temperature regardless of whether the heater is screwed to the box, or floating in mid air inside. The gradient from the heater to the outside world will be wildly different, hot spots will be different and the time constant will be wildly different, but the outcome will eventually be the same. To lower the temperature of the box, you need ventilation or a heat pipe or something, to dissipate the heat to a larger sink.
HendriXML:
That's what I meant. When mounted to the case because of the low resistance path, the temperature is technically allowed to get higher, but if it should be constained by safety it can not reach those temps in reality.
For power stuff large cases are better suited imo. If I would choose for active cooling, then just a breeze, or somewhat more powerful in extreme conditions.
The psu of Rohde and Schwarz shown here Teardowns of the Rohde & Schwarz HMP4040, HMP2020 ... looks like a great design. I wonder how silent it can function.
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