Aerospace Power Electronics Radiation Heat Transfer Considerations

Radiative heat transfer calculation is not regarded as an important power supply design issue and often ignored for the reasons that 1) Radiative heat transfer is insignificant compared with convection and conduction; 2) to use radiation portion of the heat transfer as safety factor in thermal design; 3) building a radiation model is time consuming. Although these excuses are true in some cases, they are wrong in many others. The answer depends on the material and the local thermal conditions.

This paper studies the radiation phenomena in airborne electronic packaging; identifies dominating factors; presents engineering guidelines of when, where and why the radiative heat transfer can be ignored and how to use simplified radiative heat transfer method to save time and budget in certain circumstances.