PCB Technical - Several heat dissipation methods of PCB

We all know that electronic equipment will produce a certain amount of heat when working, and if PCB board is always in high temperature, it may make the components on the PCB board fail due to overheating. Therefore, it is necessary to attach great importance to the heat dissipation of PCB board. What are the cooling methods of PCB board?

How can PCB board heat dissipation

1. Heat dissipation through PCB itself

The commonly used PCB boards are copper-clad, epoxy glass cloth or phenolic resin glass cloth. Although these substrates have excellent electrical and processing properties, they have poor heat dissipation. Therefore, to solve the problem of heat dissipation, the method is to improve the heat dissipation capacity of PCB which is in direct contact with heating elements, and transmit or emit through PCB board.

2. High heating device with radiator and heat conduction plate

When there are a few devices in the PCB board with large heat output (less than 3), heat sink or heat conduction tube can be added to the heating device. When the temperature can not be lowered, the radiator with fan can be used to enhance the heat dissipation effect. When there are more heating devices (more than 3), large heat sink can be used.

3. Adopt reasonable wiring design to realize heat dissipation

Because of the poor thermal conductivity of resin in PCB, and the circuit and hole of copper foil are good conductors of heat, improving the residual rate of copper foil and increasing heat conduction hole are the main means of heat dissipation.

4. Arrange components according to heat dissipation

The devices on the same PCB board should be arranged according to their calorific value and heat dissipation degree as far as possible. The devices with small calorific value or poor heat resistance (such as small signal transistors, small scale integrated circuits, etc.) should be placed at the upstream (entrance) of the cooling air flow, and the devices with high heat output or good heat resistance (such as power transistors, large-scale integrated circuits, etc.) should be placed downstream of the cooling air flow.

5. Avoid hot spots on PCB

In order to keep the uniformity and uniformity of PCB surface temperature performance, the components with high power should be evenly distributed on the PCB as much as possible. However, it is difficult to achieve strict uniform distribution in the design process, but we must avoid areas with high power density, so as to avoid hot spots affecting the normal operation of the whole circuit.