Thermal Modeling of Outdoor Digital Displays under Different Brightness Outputs

The thermal design process for electronic products often minimizes the use of computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer (CFD/HT) software in favor of quick prototyping and testing to determine the thermal characteristics of the product. For large-scale products with many thermal challenges, such a strategy can be impractical due to the high cost of prototyping cycles, time constraints, and inevitable iterations involved. In such cases, thorough CFD/HT models developed early in the design process are valuable for driving the product design. Based on this idea, the study examines thermal performance of 55” outdoor digital displays using CFD/HT tools and a prediction under hazardous outdoor condition is made for two different brightness outputs. The prediction is extrapolated and validated through the outdoor testing and simulation comparisons. It is shown that CFD/HT software can be used as a means of making conservative design choices.