ABSTRACT
During my many years of working with mechanical design engineers, I have found that forced air prediction is often the only analytical effort devoted to preliminary design activities. Certainly it must be the first step of a system thermal analysis because airflow estimates in card channels, heat sink passages, etc. are necessary for air temperature and convective heat transfer calculations. Even if you are fortunate enough to have access to computational fluid dynamics software, you most certainly should always begin with the fundamental calculations explained in this chapter to ensure that you either have hope of an adequate design or should instead revise your initial concepts.
