Simulated and Experimental Thermal Analysis of Home Entertainment Server

Abstract

This paper describes the simulated and experimental thermal analysis of a home entertainment server (home server). Heat dissipation per unit area in consumer electronics is set to increase tremendously with increasing product functions and the trend of slimmer, smaller and aesthetic looking in product design. This trend poses a challenge to thermal management of such products. To ensure good reliability and functionality, thermal design and thermal simulation for our home server have been carried out prior to prototyping. Simulated temperatures of two hard disk drives (HDDs), central processing unit (CPU) obtained from the thermal analysis are 38.4, 40.2 and 78.5ºC respectively. Temperature measurement results show good agreement with simulated results with an average error of 10%. Both measurement and simulated results of HDDs and CPU fall within their recommended working temperature regime. IntroductionDigital storage and consumer electronics product are playing an important and indispensable role in future home lifestyle. Home server, which is networked to all personal computers (clients) in the bedrooms, requires huge storage capacity. Considering its large capacity and lower price per gigabyte (GB), HDD is chosen as digital storage device in our home server instead of flash-based storage device. Nevertheless, one of the major drawbacks of HDD is heat generation [1]. It is known that the reliability and performance of the home server mainly rely on operation temperature of major heat generating components such as HDD and CPU. The importance of thermal analysis for HDD and CPU can also be reflected by the fact that they are the most expensive single components which make up the large portion of the price of the whole system. With the design trend of futuristic looking and slim product, thermal design and management have to be dealt with prior prototyping.To achieve desirable lifetime, casing of HDD are not allowed to exceed 50 º C. A HDD running at high temperature may cause reliability problems, from data corruption to permanent failure of the device [2]. For instance, a HDD running at 10°C above recommended temperature, its reliability becomes two times less [3].For Integrated circuits (IC) chips, relation between failure rate and temperature is as below:

Modeling and Thermal Simulation of 2U-Rack Servers Applying Computational Fluid Dynamics Techniques

“…Applications of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques for desktop computers and server simulations are addressed in the literature by several authors. A home entertainment server is simulated in [4], aiming to perform thermal analysis, evaluating the heat accumulation in hard disks (HDDs) and in the central processing unit (CPU). A CFD model was created using Flotherm simulation software, and it was concluded that both the HDDs and the CPU were operating at the allowable temperature limits.…”