A new approach for generating compact thermal models

Thermal models are more and more used to simulate power electronic devices. For example, in aeronautic domains, the numerical validation of prototype in high temperature environment is very important. Thermal modeling is generally performed using finite element or finite volume methods, which are difficult to integrate in the design procedure. These simulations must then combine different software and lead to important computation times. To develop reduced models, many methodologies are proposed as: the thermal quadrupoles method [1][2][3], the nodal method [4], Pole Analysis via Congruence Transformation (PACT) method [5] and thermal matrix description. All these methods allow developing conductive thermal models with a limited number of unknowns and are called compact thermal models. This paper focuses on how the thermal matrix description methodology can be used with finite element method to generate reduced models that are boundary-condition-independent. This method is successfully used in the present study to generate reduced models for 1D and 2D.