Implementation of Thermal Contact Conductance in Thermal Simulation Calculations

In thermal simulation, the contact interface of different materials is not a perfect fit due to different surface roughness. There is often air in the contact gap which has a lower thermal conductivity than solid material, so the contact gap results in a decrease in thermal conductivity. And the equivalent thermal resistance is always used in most thermal simulations to simplify the calculation. The implementation of thermal contact conductance is incorporated into the finite element method thermal simulation solver in this paper. Furthermore, optimization is carried out in mesh processing and calculation. The thermal simulation of the heat sink is also performed and the simulation results are compared with the commercial software COMSOL. The results were calibrated for accuracy. It is verified that the thermal contact conductance implementation in this study is successful.