Developed and iterated conduction-cooled electronics packaging through first-principles analysis, CAD, thermal FEA, design reviews, manufacturing support, and physical fit-up.
The underlying program is proprietary. This case study is organized around the engineering process rather than the product: what the problem was, how I worked it, and what I took from it.
I was assigned an electronics-packaging design problem: a circuit-card assembly installed inside a constrained chassis architecture. The mechanical solution had to protect the electronics, locate and retain the assembly, hold its interfaces, and provide a conductive heat path from heat-generating components — all while staying manufacturable and mass-efficient, and satisfying thermal requirements under a worst-case hot, steady-state condition.
Thermal performance, packaging, interfaces, manufacturability, and mass were coupled. Changing wall thickness, contact geometry, material distribution, or interface features improved one objective and generally degraded another.
Developed CAD geometry in Siemens NX. Iterated wall thicknesses, contact features, material distribution, interfaces, and packaging against thermal and manufacturing constraints. Produced manufacturing drawings.
Built simplified 1-D thermal-resistance models in hand calcs and Excel. Used them as first-order design guidance and as a sanity check against simulation trends.
Developed and executed the Simcenter thermal-analysis workflow, covering geometry prep, meshing, boundary conditions, and worst-case hot steady-state solves. Used the results to drive design variants.
Presented alternatives, assumptions, simulation results, and tradeoffs in Technical Design Reviews. Incorporated feedback from more experienced engineers into subsequent iterations.
Updated geometry to improve manufacturability, supported drawing development, and coordinated with fabrication as design intent translated into hardware.
Participated in physical assembly and form/fit evaluation. Applied thermal interface materials during integration; diagnosed and corrected fit interferences on early prototype units.
Before relying on detailed FEA, I used simplified one-dimensional conduction models to understand the dominant thermal behavior: approximate resistance through candidate conduction paths, sensitivity to wall thickness, material distribution, and whether a proposed geometry was moving performance in the correct direction.
Hand calculations weren't a replacement for FEA. They were the fast engineering check that built intuition and screened geometry changes before evaluating detailed variants in simulation.
Prepared geometry, developed and refined meshes, applied documented boundary conditions, evaluated worst-case steady-state conditions, interpreted temperature distributions and thermal bottlenecks, and used the results to drive mechanical design iterations.
A significant part of the work was model discipline: simplifying and meshing efficiently without inflating computational cost, and reading temperature distributions for what they revealed about the geometry rather than only the peak value.
One important design strategy was creating direct conductive paths between higher-heat components and the metallic cover through thermal interface material, a lower-resistance route than relying primarily on heat spreading through the circuit-card structure.
I iterated the contact geometry and surrounding material distribution against thermal results and packaging constraints. Once modeled performance was adequate, material that contributed little to the dominant thermal path could be reduced, cutting mass and manufacturing complexity without giving up the intended conduction behavior.
The design evolved through repeated analysis and review. Variables in play included wall thickness, material distribution, contact-feature geometry, mechanical interfaces, cover-to-cover interface concepts, retention configuration, thermal-interface implementation, manufacturability, and packaging clearance.
The important point isn't the specific configuration that was selected — it's the coupling:
I presented proposed geometry, analysis assumptions, simulation results, and design alternatives in formal Technical Design Reviews — comparing configurations, discussing where observed behavior differed from expectation, taking feedback from more experienced engineers, and updating assumptions, models, or CAD in the next iteration.
I drove the analysis and design work under engineering supervision; the review process shaped which tradeoffs were carried forward.
During iteration I learned to identify and remove unnecessary manufacturing complexity: features smaller or more intricate than needed, internal geometry that created unnecessary machining difficulty, and tolerances or shapes whose engineering value didn't justify the fabrication cost.
The design was revised to preserve mechanical interfaces and thermal function while simplifying noncritical geometry.
During physical fit-up of an early manufactured unit, I found interference between the cover geometry and components on the circuit-card assembly. Physical fit-up exposed a discrepancy between the analysis geometry and as-built hardware.
The design progressed through analysis, review, manufacturing, and physical integration, with hardware used to validate form, fit, and the analysis-driven design approach.
A high-quality analysis can still produce misleading confidence if the underlying geometry or assumptions don't represent the real hardware.
Hand calcs gave intuition and trend checks; simulation gave the spatial resolution to evaluate realistic geometry. Neither was used blindly.
Wall thickness, contact geometry, material removal, packaging clearance, retention, and manufacturability all moved the thermal solution.
A geometrically valid CAD model isn't automatically a good physical design. Fabrication constraints changed how features were sized and shaped.
Design reviews, updated constraints, simulation results, manufacturing feedback, and hardware fit-up all caused legitimate design changes. The process was not linear.