Heat Transfer Simulation of Computer Chassis With Microcontroller Based Temperature Control

Choong, Dick Phang (2018) Heat Transfer Simulation of Computer Chassis With Microcontroller Based Temperature Control. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

This project studies the cooling effect produced by the chassis fans on the temperature of the air and electronic components in the computer, and suggests an improvement to existing systems by adding a microcontroller to control the fan speed. The simulation is done using SolidWorks 2016 Flow Simulation, which uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to perform the simulations. To perform the simulation, the desktop computer‟s internal components are modeled, then a flow simulation is done by setting the boundary conditions (such as input heat from the CPU, fan volume flow rates, etc). Adjustments are made to this simulation in order to find a reduced temperature in the air of the computer chassis, which will be implemented by using the microcontroller via 2 types of fan control algorithm. One control algorithm has the fans change speeds every 10°C of detected change in air temperature in the chassis (named simple fan control). Another more complex control algorithm has the fans follow an exponential curve with the change in temperature (named Rapid fan control). The project finds that the simple and rapid fan control algorithms produce a large margin of improvement, and the rapid fan control algorithm is slightly better than the simple fan control algorithm.