In proportion to the increased density in electronic packaging from chip to system levels of telecommunication system, thermal management is becoming a vital subject to save the cost of the electronic product and to maintain high reliability. The key to the successful application of the thermal management technique is the capability to predict the equipment thermal behaviors in early stage of system development and product design. This paper describes the application of correlations of natural convection to TDX-10 digital switching system, which has been under the 5 year development project since 1987, in order to predict equipment temperature and thermal behaviors whihin a rack.