Electronics Cooling?

[djones]

All this talk of holes etc for 'cooling the electronics' that keeps going on in the cars section....

Why would they ever need to?

Sure in the KERS days I could see why but unless these parts are near the hot engine, why would they possibly get hot enough to require cooling?

[Pandamasque]

To quote a famous Finn, yes.

[DaveKillens]

These aren't ordinary electronics. They too are designed for minimum packaging and weight, as all components. And when the car is running, they aren't idle but working very hard. Additionally, they are critical to the performance of the car, allow the electronics to get hot enough to degrade, and we wind up in the classic situation where a car fails because of one small part, one part that should not have failed.

Because everything under the skin is packaged ultra-tight, there really isn't any appreciable random airflow to allow cooling. You have a component that generates heat and would fail if the component becomes too hot, so you have to import some form of cooling.

[Fil]

All this talk of holes etc for 'cooling the electronics' that keeps going on in the cars section....

Why would they ever need to?

Sure in the KERS days I could see why but unless these parts are near the hot engine, why would they possibly get hot enough to require cooling?

have you touched a power pack from a laptop, or xbox360/ps3 after they've been used for 30min?
or the bottom of a laptop, even the back of a tv?

electronics generate heat. household appliances have the luxury of using heatsinks & fans with sufficient space around them to allow for cooling airflow.

an F1 environment is a little more extreme. heatsinks in particular are quite heavy, so a key area of mass-reduction is reducing/removing them completely. this compromises heat-reduction, requiring more air-flow to maintain operating temperatures..

at 200km/h+ there's plenty of air flowing, its just a matter of directing it efficiently past the right components with minimal drag.

[ESPImperium]

Take the processor fan and case fans away from your computer, does it still need any cooling??? Answer is yes, they will run very very hot and critical, degrade really quickly, inhibiting the usefulness of your computer.

Untill the processor can become "Solid State" and not require cooling, this will still be the case.

The cooling for such electronics isnt as critical as say a KERS unint or a radiator that is connected to a engine or gearbox, but its still a packaging issue.

Take the solution of the BMW F1.09, they managed to put alot of the electronics in the engine bay, low down towards the rear, with the shark gills close to the floor, below the bodywork. Also take the Williams FW31s solution, put the electronics above the radiator next to the driver, where that little shark gill emerged close to the drivers headrest, where the rules allowed them to being close to the centre line.

Here are a good few of the 2009 soilutions. Brawn did something diffrent and Force India did their cooling thrugh their radiators via a hidden scoop inside the radiator holes, but cannot find a decent ehough shot of it as they must be painted black, but heres the collage:


Direct Link: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v66/I ... utions.jpg

[tarzoon]

have you touched a power pack from a laptop, or xbox360/ps3 after they've been used for 30min?
or the bottom of a laptop, even the back of a tv?

electronics generate heat. household appliances have the luxury of using heatsinks & fans with sufficient space around them to allow for cooling airflow.

an F1 environment is a little more extreme. heatsinks in particular are quite heavy, so a key area of mass-reduction is reducing/removing them completely. this compromises heat-reduction, requiring more air-flow to maintain operating temperatures..

at 200km/h+ there's plenty of air flowing, its just a matter of directing it efficiently past the right components with minimal drag.

Comparing car electronics - even F1 - is not the best example, because the hardware design is completely different.

Anyhow, there is a lot of power running there: the faster the processor, the greater the accuracy and precision. Plus there are probably some amplifiers, namely for comms and actuation/controls. Altogether they will be using quite a bit of power and that generates heat. Heat needs to be dissipated and air is the best option, especially if it comes in the likes of 200+ km/h.

[Fil]

Comparing car electronics - even F1 - is not the best example, because the hardware design is completely different.

yeh fair enough, comparing apples & oranges isn't the best i know.. but they're both still fruit!

[speedsense]

It isn't so much about the heat generated by the electronics themselves, as it is about the heat generated by the rest of the components on the car. The electronics need cooling because of external heat caused by radiators, coolers and engine compartments and it's containment inside a "box" along with them.
A laptop can live for years with high processor or battery heat. Stick it in your cars engine compartment and drive around, while it's turned on. That's what these electronics live in everyday of their life.
Racing electronics are designed to reside in such enviroments with thicker PC boards, surface technology and vibration mountings to survive. Any cooling to the electronics box is a welcome thing, and as with all electronics, the cooler the better, though your personal laptop would never survive 10 minutes in the side pod of a F1 car!! Many of these electronic design can go the full season (or two) without failure..

[Mohammad]

Does an F1 car really need a desktop-class CPU? namely, one that is running at 3.00+ GHz, quad core with lots of heat (+125W)?

I don't think so. I believe that the electronics solutions in F1 cars are tailor made; that is, they don't use general purpose processors one would find in a PC. Tailor-made circuits tend to operate at a fraction of the frequency whilst offering great speedups over conventional general-purpose processors.

So I believe cooling is required not due to the heat signature of the components themselves, rather it is due to the environment they have to live in, as speedsense said.

[tarzoon]

yeh fair enough, comparing apples & oranges isn't the best i know.. but they're both still fruit!

The electronics need cooling because of external heat caused by radiators, coolers and engine compartments and it's containment inside a "box" along with them.

Yes, you're right! Even standard electronics can withstand quite high heat, and under the engine cover the place must be really hot. Still, the heat generated internally in the components is a nasty bugger and it can affect performance and chip integrity, especially considering the continuous operations demanded. I doubt that chips are running close to idle: if there's power, the engineers will use it!

[zmej]

Hi everyone, long time reader, first time poster.
Back on topic, the "heart" of all electronics in all F1 cars is TAG-310B (PDF File). (not sure if they use 310B, 210 or 400 module)


As McLaren state, its power consumption when operational is about 40W (~14Vdc/~3Adc) and the internal temperature should not increase 70 deg C. It is not an easy task to accomplish this even it is not heated by other car internals, its cooling is obligatory.
The MPU they use, i believe, is PowerPC 476FP, and for the tasks it is designed, is better than any PC-processor (they are different though). As I can see, they use some weird method for programming - "Application code is autocoded using our Graphical Development Environment (GDE) from Matlab/Simulink control modules." - this adds some overhead for both code and time (this means a directly programmed less powerful MPU should be capable of doing exactly the same work), but the benefit of using their system is that they can change the firmware very fast without the need of highly experienced software developers with thorough knowledge in engine and transmission control.
But there are other electronic units that require cooling (well, may be not all of them), for example ingnition and injection modules: IGN310 and INJ310

In general, electronic components are divided into temperature grades, with general purpose grade 0-70 deg C (rarely used), industrial grade (-20 to 105/125 deg C - lower and upper limits vary upon manufacturer and part), and military grade (-40/60 to +150/+175 - again vary upon manufacturer and part). I doubt if they use anything else than military grade components. Any decent electronic device should be capable of working at 100 deg C, but keep in mind, that the crystal temperature of every heatsink-mounted semiconductor is at least 5 to 20 deg C (and may be more, depending on the design) more than the temperature that you can measure on the heatsink surface.

[ESPImperium]

Hi everyone, long time reader, first time poster.
Back on topic, the "heart" of all electronics in all F1 cars is TAG-310B (PDF File). (not sure if they use 310B, 210 or 400 module)


As McLaren state, its power consumption when operational is about 40W (~14Vdc/~3Adc) and the internal temperature should not increase 70 deg C. It is not an easy task to accomplish this even it is not heated by other car internals, its cooling is obligatory.
The MPU they use, i believe, is PowerPC 476FP, and for the tasks it is designed, is better than any PC-processor (they are different though). As I can see, they use some weird method for programming - "Application code is autocoded using our Graphical Development Environment (GDE) from Matlab/Simulink control modules." - this adds some overhead for both code and time (this means a directly programmed less powerful MPU should be capable of doing exactly the same work), but the benefit of using their system is that they can change the firmware very fast without the need of highly experienced software developers with thorough knowledge in engine and transmission control.
But there are other electronic units that require cooling (well, may be not all of them), for example ingnition and injection modules: IGN310 and INJ310

In general, electronic components are divided into temperature grades, with general purpose grade 0-70 deg C (rarely used), industrial grade (-20 to 105/125 deg C - lower and upper limits vary upon manufacturer and part), and military grade (-40/60 to +150/+175 - again vary upon manufacturer and part). I doubt if they use anything else than military grade components. Any decent electronic device should be capable of working at 100 deg C, but keep in mind, that the crystal temperature of every heatsink-mounted semiconductor is at least 5 to 20 deg C (and may be more, depending on the design) more than the temperature that you can measure on the heatsink surface.

Thanks for that link, it really explains alot on something im doing on the SECU and driverd delta pannel on the steering wheel and what a modren SECU steering wheel does. Do you have anything on the delta control???

[zmej]

Unfortunately, not. I just followed information on MES website. I suppose driver panel/steering wheel is connected to the ECU by CAN interface. (A little) information can be found also on Cosworth website.

[WhiteBlue]

http://argent.fia.com/web/AppelOffre.ns ... penelement

FIA spec for ECU tender

[ESPImperium]

Thanks for those links again. WhiteBlue, thanks for that link to the FIA ECU PDF, that really explains the whole thing better to me, and means that i can envisualise the whole thing in a graphical format with pictures as well.