Abstract
Providing an enclosure to house electronic components is essential to protect the overall performance of a hybrid electric assembly. One of the challenges of squeezing many heat generating components into one small housing is the thermal management of these systems. Each component has its own thermal limitations, and housing them together means that the ability to shed heat becomes more complex for each component. To further complicate matters, companies that provide custom solutions to their customers, find it impractical to customize the housing as well. The fast design, and one-off nature of this business often leads to mistakes in the thermal management plan causing failures in initial testing. While a redesign is necessary, the time allowed for the redesign, part procurement, fabrication, and assembly can sometime be limited to just a few days. Knowing what tools are available for heat shedding, their effectiveness, cost, and availability can all play into the redesign solution. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an understanding of these tools and their effectiveness by using Solidworks Flow Simulation. Every scenario is unique and has many factors influencing the manner in which it sheds heat. This study will give a relative understanding of what affects the performance, pitfalls that can be avoided, further considerations in the redesign, along with the pros and cons of implementing various common solutions.