Protection of Electronics from Environmental Temperature Spikes by Phase Change Materials

Abstract

Protection of electronics from high temperature environments is desirable in applications such as harsh environment industrial sensor networks for continuous monitoring and probing. In this paper, the use of phase-change-material (PCM) encapsulation of electronics is proposed as protection from environment-induced, probing-induced or electronic power burst -induced temperature spikes. An outline of the encapsulation method is given and a heat flow analysis is performed. A lumped element model is introduced and a numerical simulator is implemented. An encapsulation setup is fabricated and tested, allowing an experimental validation of the proposed method and model. The numerical simulation model is then used to study particular temperature spike scenarios. The results demonstrate that at reasonable encapsulation sizes and for commercially available phase-change and insulation materials, short-term protection from large temperature spikes can be provided by the proposed method. As an indicative example, for a typical sensor node normally operating at a 20 o C environment, PCM encapsulation may provide protection for 28 s of exposure to 1000 o C per PCM gram.

Effect of the PSSMA Content on the Heat Transfer Performances of Polyurea Nano-Encapsulated Phase Change Materials

“…Although various known methods exist that can reduce the supercooling degree of PCMs, no previous studies have shown this effect clearly. Future work in this area will therefore be focused on the development of a new heat-resistant material through reducing the supercooling temperature of such PCMs [31].…”

Paraffin wax microsphere embedded epoxy composites for potential thermal management in electronic devices

“…PCMs had been widely used for passive thermal management of electronic devices. [9][10][11][12][13] But, one of the major issues with PCM is leakage due to its solid-liquid phase transition. Microencapsulation has mitigated the problem of leakage, 14 but it too has a major concern with the process of microencapsulation such as contamination of PCM with shell materials, 15 low barrier property of shell material, 16 and the high cost of encapsulation.…”