Graphite Foam Heat Exchangers for Thermal Management

Klett, J.W.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

关键词: Copper;    Aluminium;    Pumping;    Fluid Flow;    Evaporative Cooling;   

DOI  :  10.2172/885604
RP-ID  :  C/ORNL 02-0639
RP-ID  :  DE-AC05-00OR22725
RP-ID  :  885604

美国|英语

来源: UNT Digital Library

【 摘 要 】

Improved thermal management is needed to increase the power density of electronic and more effectively cool electronic enclosures that are envisioned in future aircraft, spacecraft and surface ships. Typically, heat exchanger cores must increase in size to more effectively dissipate increased heat loads, this would be impossible in many cases, thus improved heat exchanger cores will be required. In this Phase I investigation, MRi aimed to demonstrate improved thermal management using graphite foam (Gr-foam) core heat exchangers. The proposed design was to combine Gr-foams from POCO with MRi's innovative low temperature, active metal joining process (S-Bond{trademark}) to bond Gr-foam to aluminum, copper and aluminum/SiC composite faceplates. The results were very favorable, so a Phase II SBIR with the MDA was initiated. This had primarily 5 tasks: (1) bonding, (2) thermal modeling, (3) cooling chip scale packages, (4) evaporative cooling techniques and (5) IGBT cold plate development. The bonding tests showed that the ''reflow'' technique with S-Bond{reg_sign}-220 resulted in the best and most consistent bond. Then, thermal modeling was used to design different chip scale packages and IGBT cold plates. These designs were used to fabricate many finned graphite foam heat sinks specifically for two standard type IC packages, the 423 and 478 pin chips. These results demonstrated several advantages with the foam. First, the heat sinks with the foam were lighter than the copper/aluminum sinks used as standards. The sinks for the 423 design made from foam were not as good as the standard sinks. However, the sinks made from foam for the 478 pin chips were better than the standard heat sinks used today. However, this improvement was marginal (in the 10-20% better regime). However, another important note was that the epoxy bonding technique resulted in heat sinks with similar results as that with the S-bond{reg_sign}, slightly worse than the S-bond{reg_sign}, but still better than the standard heat sinks. Next, work with evaporative cooling techniques, such as heat pipes, demonstrated some unique behavior with the foam that is not seen with standard wick materials. This was that as the thickness of the foam increased, the performance got better, where with standard wick materials, as the thickness increases, the performance decreases. This is yet to be completely explained. Last, the designs from the thermal model were used to fabricate a series of cold plates with the graphite foam and compare them to similar designs using high performance folded fin aluminum sinks (considered standard in the industry). It was shown that by corrugating the foam parallel to fluid flow, the pressure drop can be reduced significantly while maintaining the same heat transfer as that in the folded fin heat sink. In fact, the results show that the graphite foam heat sink can utilized 5% the pumping power as that required with the folded fin aluminum heat sink, yet remove the same amount of heat.