Consumer electronics such as laptops, mobile phones, gaming desktops and smart home devices have become a growing part of day to day human life in this digital era. The high tech industry faces the challenge of designing a vast variety of these devices at a rapid pace to keep up with the consumer demands. Good cooling & air circulation are essential considerations while designing these electronic devices for better durability & efficiency. The cooling fan module installed inside these devices is a key component to achieve the required thermal management. Forced air driven by these fans can cause significant noise that affect the comfort of the users. Also, how these fan modules are packaged inside these electronic devices and the environmental conditions can have a significant impact on the noise. Therefore, keeping these noise levels lower is another important consideration while designing these electronic devices. Ensuring good thermal management & lower noise levels at all operating environment is quite difficult to achieve with experimental techniques only due to cost, time and complexity. Therefore, there is a strong need to use computational techniques during the design of these devices. This study presents the use of a well validated computational solution for fan noise to evaluate and improve the noise performance of a cooling fan module inside a tablet without compromising its cooling efficiency. Detailed digital models of the tablet and the cooling fan module are prepared and used for this study. This computational approach uses Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver to predict the transient flow and the noise generated by it. A sliding mesh Local Reference Frame (LRF) scheme is used to model the fan rotation. Noise source analysis is performed on the baseline design to come up with a design improvement that reduced the overall noise level by 2 dB without compromising the air flow performance. Computational approach such as this can speed up and improve the design of these digital devices to meet consumer demands.
Reference | NWC23-0433-presentation |
---|---|
Authors | Shock. R Senthooran. S Kim. M |
Language | English |
Type | Presentation |
Date | 16th May 2023 |
Organisations | Exa Dassault Systèmes |
Region | Global |
Stay up to date with our technology updates, events, special offers, news, publications and training
If you want to find out more about NAFEMS and how membership can benefit your organisation, please click below.
Joining NAFEMS© NAFEMS Ltd 2025
Developed By Duo Web Design