The effect of components' thermal properties in addition to their geometric configuration on the developed thermal stress in a model printed circuit board (PCB) is investigated. This effect is quantified through three parameters, the average normalized temperature gradient, maximum normalized temperature gradient and the uniformity factor. It is found that the effect of the geometric configuration, especially that of the heat-generating component, is more significant than the thermal properties of the components. © 2019 IEEE.

Improvement of structural efficiency in various materials is critically important for sustainable society development and the efficient use of natural resources. Recently, a lot of attention in science and engineering has been attracted to heterogeneous-structure materials because of high structural efficiency. However, strategies for the efficient design of heterogenous structures are still in their infancy therefore demanding extensive exploration. In this work, two-dimensional finite-element models for pure nickel with bimodal distributions of grain sizes having ‘harmonic’ and ‘random’