Post by Clément Lacombe

Your component is within its power rating. So why is it still overheating? Power rating tells you how much energy a component can handle. It does not tell you how effectively that energy will leave the component and reach the ambient environment. That is a thermal design problem, and it is entirely separate. Heat follows the path of least resistance. If that path is not designed deliberately, it defaults to conduction through the PCB, which is slow, or natural convection from a bare component surface, which is often insufficient for anything above a few watts. Heat sinks and cold plates exist to shorten and widen that path. A heat sink increases the effective surface area exposed to air, turning a small hot component into a large, cooler radiating surface. The geometry, fin density and material all affect how much thermal resistance is removed from the system. A cold plate replaces air entirely with liquid as the cooling medium. Because water carries heat roughly 3500 times more effectively than air per unit volume, cold plates can handle power densities that no air-cooled solution can match, without noise, without moving parts, and without the airflow requirements that conflict with EMC sealing. In this video, we present the Compelma thermal management component range: → Heat sink families and selection criteria → Cold plate technology and integration principles → How to choose between air and liquid cooling for your application Watch the full video here: https://lnkd.in/eveh8zhS #ThermalManagement #ColdPlates #HeatSinks #ElectronicsCooling #Compelma