Electronic components are usually assembled on printed circuit boards cooled by forced airflow. When the spacing between the boards is small, there is no room to employ a heat sink on critical components. Under these conditions, the components’ thermal control may depend on the conductive path from the heater to the board in addition to the direct convective heat transfer to the airflow.The conjugate forced convection-conduction heat transfer from a two-dimensional strip heater flush mounted to a finite thickness wall of a parallel plates channel cooled by a laminar airflow was investigated numerically. A uniform heat flux was generated along the strip heater surface. Under steady state conditions, a fraction of the heat generation was transferred by direct convection to the airflow in the channel and the remaining fraction was transferred by conduction to the channel wall. The lower surface of the channel wall was adiabatic, so that the heat conducted from the heater to the plate eventually returned to the airflow. A portion of it returned upstream of the heater, preheating the airflow before it reached the heater surface. Due to this, it was convenient to treat the direct convection from the heater surface to the airflow by the adiabatic heat transfer coefficient. The flow was developed from the channel entrance, with constant properties.The conjugate problem was solved numerically within a single solution domain comprising both the airflow region and the solid wall of the channel. The results were obtained for the channel flow Reynolds number ranging from about 600 to 1900, corresponding to average airflow velocities from 0.5 m/s to 1.5 m/s. The effects of the solid wall to air thermal conductivities ratio were investigated in the range from 10 to 80, typical of circuit board materials. The wall thickness influence was verified from 1 mm to 5 mm. The results indicated that within these ranges, the conductive substrate wall provided a substantial enhancement of the heat transfer from the heater, accomplished by an increase of its average adiabatic surface temperature.

A numerical investigation was performed to evaluate distinct convective heat transfer coefficients for three discrete strip heat sources flush mounted to a wall of a parallel plates channel. Uniform heat flux was considered along each heat source, but the remaining channel surfaces were assumed adiabatic. A laminar airflow with constant properties was forced into the channel considering either developed flow or a uniform velocity at the channel entrance. The conservation equations were solved using the finite volumes method together with the SIMPLE algorithm. The convective coefficients were evaluated considering three possibilities for the reference temperature. The first was the fluid entrance temperature into the channel, the second was the flow mixed mean temperature just upstream any heat source, and the third option employed the adiabatic wall temperature concept. It is shown that the last alternative gives rise to an invariant descriptor, the adiabatic heat transfer coefficient, which depends solely on the flow and the geometry. This is very convenient for the thermal analysis of electronic equipment, where the components' heating is discrete and can be highly non-uniform.