Project · Creator and maintainer
thermalkli
An Octave command-line toolbox for heatsink design and semiconductor thermal analysis.
Updated
Context
Thermal pre-dimensioning decides whether a converter concept is viable, and it happens early, when no hardware exists and a full CFD model is not yet justified.
Constraint
The useful correlations for thermal resistance, fin efficiency, forced and natural convection, and heatsink optimization sit scattered across papers and personal spreadsheets, so each engineer rebuilds them and no two answers are comparable.
Contribution
I built thermalkli, an Octave toolbox with a command-line interface covering thermal-resistance calculation, fin efficiency, layer and stack resistance, forced and natural convection, water cooling, heatsink database lookup, and CSPI optimization after Drofenik and Kolar.
Approach
Every capability is a subcommand with explicit arguments or a configuration file, so a calculation is a command that can be recorded, repeated, and reviewed. The toolbox also generates FEMM verification scripts, so an analytical answer can be checked against a finite-element model instead of trusted on its own.
Outcome
Thermal pre-dimensioning becomes a reproducible command rather than a private spreadsheet, and the analytical result carries a path to its own verification.
Evidence
The public repository holds the CLI, the command set, example configurations, and the FEMM generation and comparison commands.