Rationale
Industry moves towards ever increasing functionality, performance, miniaturization and less cost, resulting in higher heat densities and corresponding higher temperatures. Unfortunately, these have a negative impact on the performance, reliability and lifetime of electronic products, making thermal design more challenging than ever.

Optimization of thermal design is relevant for many electronic applications, such as consumer electronics, semiconductors, power electronics, LED applications, automotive, data centers, internet of everything, digital twins etc.

The very experienced lecturer Wendy Luiten (winner of the prestigious Harvey Rosten Award 2014 and the Thermi Award 2024) teaches participants how to solve the thermal problems inherent in electronics today. Based on lots of industrial thermal design experience, she presents a balanced mix of theory and practice.

The famous 20+year old 3-day classroom course, originally intended for inexperienced as well as experienced participants, has been replaced by two modules to meet the requirements of modern times.

  • Electronics cooling thermal design (COE-TD; lecturer: Wendy Luiten)

This module is organized either as a 5 half-days online module (via Microsoft Teams) or as a 3 full-days offline classical course. It is intended for engineers not experienced in thermal design.

  • Advanced thermal management of electronics (COE-ADV; lecturer Wendy Luiten)

This module is organized as a 4 half-days online module (via Microsoft Teams). It is intended for engineers familiar with at least the contents of the thermal design module.

We kept the excellent and high-quality contents. We addressed feedback from our previous trainings to change the original course:

  • split up the thermal design part (module 1) and the advanced cooling topics part (module 2);
  • add much more time to digest the theory;
  • provide more opportunities for hands-on practice;
  • spend more time on current and future electronic cooling solutions.

The thermal design module allows for sufficient opportunities for practicing and achieving an active skill level for designing new thermal applications, evaluating existing thermal applications, and assessing computational simulation models.

The advanced part builds on this foundation and is scheduled several weeks later. This provides more time to get familiar with the material and facilitates the uptake of the advanced material.

We strongly advice not to attend only the thermal design part since the advanced thermal management course gives very valuable additional information to assist in preventing thermal problems.

Both trainings are available for open enrollment as well as for in-company sessions. For in-company sessions, the training can be adapted to your situation and special needs.

Objective

The thermal training course focuses on recognition and prevention of thermal problems through optimal thermal design and architecture choices in all stages of the industrial product creation process - avoiding re-design, delayed time-to-market and associated costs in time and resources. It gives concrete guidelines to make the right thermal design choices on component, module and system level.

After the thermal (online) course, the participant:

  • has obtained a basic understanding of heat transfer phenomena;
  • knows how to apply this knowledge in practice;
  • is able to make the right thermal design choices on component, module and system level;
  • knows how to estimate when a thermal expert needs to be consulted;
  • is able to communicate with thermal experts;
  • is able to estimate the impact of system architecture, mechanical dimensions, material properties and heat dissipations on critical temperatures;
  • is able to assess in-house or outsourced thermal computer simulations;
  • knows the embedding of ‘thermal design and cooling of electronics’ in a system engineering context;
  • has obtained an active skill level in thermal system design.

Target audience

This thermal training course is intended for engineers (electronic, mechanical/mechatronic, reliability) directly involved with thermal design and cooling of electronic components, modules and systems, engineers confronted with thermal problems/issues, Thermal Engineers, System Architects, or those who want to understand and learn more about this subject of growing importance due to the electronification of society, be it automotive, LEDs, Internet-of-Things or data centers.

Prerequisites: technical college/university education.

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Next edition info
Duration If online: 5 half-day sessions / In person: 3 days
Frequency Twice per year
Involved
Wendy Luiten MSc
Involved
Wendy Luiten MSc
Score
9.3
Price per participant € 1,950 *
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Program

To allow for sufficient time to digest new information and to gather hands-on experience, the course has been enriched with homework assignments that can be attempted in the evening and will be discussed and demonstrated during the following lesson.

The content is based on cooling of electronics in a system engineering context, following the well-known V model of system level – subsystem level - component level, requirements flow down and capabilities flow up. Application of the system engineering concepts to the thermal domain and physics of heat transfer will be demonstrated and practiced.

Training time is divided roughly equally over theory and practice. Practice sessions will take the form of try-it-yourself exercises, followed by step-by-step guidance and demonstration.

Participants do not need to be familiar with thermal simulation or to have access to simulation software.  All training exercises are spreadsheet (Excel) based. Thermal simulation will be demonstrated using commercially available CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) codes, but the concepts are also applicable to FEM (Finite Element Method) thermal codes.

The training material includes worked versions of the exercises.

The program of the training is as follows:

  • Introduction, Thermal design plan, Training set-up;
  • Specifications and Thermal requirements. Thermal requirements (Safety, Functionality/Performance, Reliability), Ideal and not-ideal thermal specifications;
  • Steady State heat transfer. Heat and temperature, Thermal resistance (Conduction, convection, radiation), Heating a flow;
  • Fins and Sinks. Rectangular, radial. Boxes;
  • Introduction to Thermal measurements. Thermal rules of Thumb. Transient heat transfer. Thermal ways of working. Step-by-step thermal problem solving. Guided exercise and demonstration of step-by-step plan;
  • Step-by-step strategy for new thermal designs. Limitations of spreadsheet models. Thermal simulation. Guided exercise on thermal system design, followed by a demonstration of the same case using computer simulations. Question and Answer. Introduction of a case study;
  • Cooling solutions. Discussion of the case study. Guided step-by-step solution of the case study. CFD verification;
  • Summary.

Methods

In-depth Physics Lectures, Industry examples, Step-by-step methodology and many worked exercises and guided practice sessions  on the theory (physics) of heat transfer, but also on identification of thermal requirements and how to design and calculate thermal systems, sub-systems and parts, how to verify a design by measurement or computer simulation, and how to optimize a thermal design. Two hands-on case studies from industry are included as guided team exercises.

Course material:  200+ page theory reader containing a copy of the slides of 17 modules, 60+ page exercise reader containing  all exercises, worked exercises and worked case studies on thermal system models, board level and component level cooling  fan-less air cooling or with fan and heatsinks.

A copy of relevant papers on the topics is available on request.

Certification

Participants will receive a High Tech Institute course certificate for attending this thermal training.

More information

Wendy Luiten interview

Wendy Luiten about good thermal design

''A proper design can save on expensive additional cooling components and cost of re-design.''

Read interview

About Wendy Luiten, electronics cooling specialist

In this 2-minute video, Wendy Luiten elaborates on her background and passion to train.

Watch video

Remarks from participants

"If I describe the course in one sentence, I'd do this way: the course goes all the way from the physical terms definitions to the details of what cell in the Excel Sheet you have to use to find the fan's operation point."

Dzmitry Kushner

"Very good to see thermal engineering from a different perspective; It was also very much appreciated that the lecturer has much actual hand-on working experience in the field!"

Philipp Hager

"Overall, training was really good & informative. Got to learn many things from case study. Exercises helped to get more practical knowledge of this training."

Jinsha Ravindran - Philips Medizin Systeme Böblingen GmbH

"Overall very informative and worthwhile training! Very nice to learn Wendy's secrets that she got from decades in the industry. She taught us how to derive simple formulas for thermal calculations, and also useful empirical “rule of thumb” formulas that you don't find in textbooks."

Odin Oma – Cisco Systems Norway AS

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