Does anybody have a good guideline for using the project case as a heat
sink?  It may be either a flat piece of aluminum or flat piece of steel.
You can find manufacturer's data on heat sinks easily, but I haven't turned
up anything on a flat heat sink either on the web or in Art of Electronics.

Seems like there was a rule of thumb - so many square inches of surface area
(aluminum)  would give so many degrees C per watt.  This is the kind of
thing I used to keep an old ARRL handbook around for, but I've long since
lost track of it.  A net search turned up long treatises on using
manufacturer's heat sink data ( which is trivial) but no practical rules of
thumb for sizing a simple flat aluminum plate heat sink.

I could measure it (I've done this) but this is just a one-off piece of test
equipment, seems a bit much.


-- Lawrence

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