Thermal Management of In-house Developed PCB for EV Applications

Dr. Jayakrishnan.R, Product Development Manager at Ashok Leyland and Sandeep Roy, Technical Specialist, Electronic System Design at Altair present at the 2024 ATCx Electronics conference.

High currents flowing through various traces of a printed circuit boards (PCB) causes thermal run away and PCB warpage due to the occurrence of high heat density. The present study discusses on transient thermal analysis performed in a PCB kept inside an enclosure. Thermal analysis allows PCB designer to quickly move and confirm the component’s placement by examining the temperature plots predicted on the PCB surface. A PCB particularly designed in-house for Ashok Leyland EV trucks is used for this present study. The performed simulations are carried out with ElectroFlo module of Altair SimLab software. The temperature at various locations of the PCB and enclosure is predicted such that hot spots can be identified and thus proper thermal management can be ensured in the design stage itself.