Thermal management of telecommunication optical module in forced convection mode

Thermal management plays an important role in the design of optical modules. The main objective in the thermal design of an optical module is to minimize its size in order to have very dense packaging in the card level. This can lead to a significant increase in its heat flux. Most optical components should be maintained at a fixed temperature, therefore a thermal electrical cooler, TEC, is used to provide this feature. As a result, a detailed thermal analysis is required to define the thermal performance of these modules. In this study, a thermal model for an optical module was investigated numerically in a velocity range of 1 m/s to 4 m/s. Both laminar and turbulent models were applied to determine the temperature rise of the optical module in the transition regime. Furthermore, the present study proposed a thermal compact model. This thermal compact model can be integrated in the board level analysis to represent the detailed thermal structure of the optical module. It is concluded that the resistance network model allows faster simulations at an accuracy of 14% thereby validating the resistance network model.