Simulation and Analysis of Heat Dissipation in Compact Routers: Efficiency of Radiators and Case Perforations

The problem of overheating of information devices to ensure wireless transmission of information is relevant nowadays, because competition among cheap routers does not allow adding expensive cooling systems such as TEC to the design, and installing fans can cause excessive noise. At the same time, the power of miniature processors is increasing to provide high throughput. This leads to a situation where, at an ambient temperature of 30-40 C, the temperature of the processor with adjacent elements becomes higher than 100 C, and may cause the device to fail or the case to melt.In this study, physical-topological simultion of one of the typical keenetic KN-1011 routers for the case of horizontal location was carried out. The distributions of air flows through the case and temperatures on the device elements were obtained for various options for improving the cooling system – adding a radiator of different sizes and additional perforation on the back side.The main results showed that adding larger heat sinks and additional ventilation holes significantly reduced CPU temperature. Specifically, when using heat sinks of configurations K2 and K3, the CPU temperature dropped to 72 °C and 68 °C, respectively, which is a substantial improvement compared to the base model, where the CPU temperature reached 112 °C. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed cooling methods, allowing optimal thermal management even under heavy loads.The article also presents a comparative analysis of thermal regimes under different cooling options. In addition to the geometric characteristics of the heat sinks, the additional ventilation holes played a crucial role in enhancing air circulation within the casing. The use of larger heat sinks, combined with casing perforation, reduced CPU temperature by more than 50%, significantly improving the overall performance and reliability of the device.