Protection of electronics from high-temperature environments is desirable in
applications such as harsh-environment industrial sensor networks for continuous
monitoring and probing. In this paper, the use of phase change
material (PCM) encapsulation of electronics is proposed as protection from
environment-induced, probing-induced or electronic power burst-induced
temperature spikes. An outline of the encapsulation method is given and a
heat flow analysis is performed. A lumped element model is introduced and a
numerical simulator is implemented. An encapsulation setup is fabricated and
tested, allowing an experimental validation of the proposed method and
model. The numerical simulation model is then used to study particular
temperature spike scenarios. The results demonstrate that at reasonable
encapsulation sizes and for commercially available phase change and insulation
materials, short-term protection from large temperature spikes can be
provided by the proposed method. As an indicative example, for a typical
sensor node normally operating at a 20C environment, PCM encapsulation
may provide protection for 28 s of exposure to 1000C per PCM gram.