Is specific heat capacity always ignored in Steady State

[C989hris]

Hi,

I want to simulate a forced convection cooling problem. Air at ambient temperature is forced through a fan into a system to cool electronics and I would like to assess the temperature of the outlet air. Actually I'm interested in the delta between the ambient and outlet temperature. This will be accessed as steady state. So my question is: is the volumetric specific heat capacity of the air relevant?

I feel like it is relevant because if I run the simulation at a higher ambient temperature the volumetric specific heat capacity gets lower and therefore the delta between ambient and outlet temperature will increase, is that correct?

Thanks

 

[CWatters]

Yes it's relevant.

Under steady state conditions, in a unit of time the electronics will dissipate a fixed amount of energy into a fixed amount of air increasing its temperature. How much it increases depends on the SHC of the air. So your input and output temperatures will depend on the SHC of the air.

However the SHC of air doesn't very much with temperature. Usually you can estimate the average temperature and look up the SHC of that and get reasonably accurate results.