Study on the Fluid–Structure Interaction of Flexible Printed Circuit Board Electronics in the Flow Environment

Flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) can be an alternative to the rigid printed circuit board (PCB) because of its excellent flexibility, twistability, reduced thickness, and light weight. In a flow environment, although the deflection and stress induced are often ignored by PCBs, these are key factors that affect the reliability of FPCBs. Thus, this paper aims to examine the effect of flow velocity, component thickness, types of component arrangement, misalignment, and inclination on a typical FPCB electronics under flow condition. These factors are found to significantly affect the deflection and stress levels of FPCBs. On the basis of the results, a few design strategies are suggested to FPCB designers to develop more reliable products. In this paper, a fluid-structure interaction (FSI) study was performed using the fluid solver FLUENT and the structural solver ABAQUS, coupled online by the mesh-based parallel code coupling interface. A simple experiment was also performed to validate the FSI numerical technique used. The research findings in this paper are believed to be valuable and important to the FPCB industries.