Thermal Properties Characterization of Space Electronic Circuits Via Image-Based Visual Techniques

One of the main challenge of satellite manufacturers is its fully safety and complete operational functioning and, once a satellite is orbiting, the thermal management of its electronical equipment is one of the most significant issue. In order to verify if all the devices maintain high performances also under the thermal stresses point of view, it is always necessary to perform a detailed thermal analysis of the electronic equipment which of course requires that its thermal properties must be correctly identified. Usually thermal designers consider worst case conditions in order to simplify the numerical simulations and to ensure functionality and safety but when challenging operative condition, high power consumption are required, or more simply the dimension of the electronic devices are very small, the worstcase approach is not sufficient to take all the aspects of the thermal management under control. In this paper a general purpose in-house numerical code for the thermal characterization of printed circuit board will be proposed. This tool exploits the image-based visual reconnaissance technique to determine the exact distribution in terms of the conductivematerialmass fraction and in-planemapping of very complex printed circuits in order to increase the descriptive level for high detailed thermal analyses. By considering the correct thermal conductivity of the circuits a more precise evaluation of the maximum temperatures reached during the operational life and in non-standard operative conditions could be handled reaching an improvement of the confidence with respect the overall equipment design. Different study cases will be proposed and analyzed in the paper in order to underline the effective improvement of the thermal design coming from a more realistic characterization of the electronic devices.