Design and Fabrication of Flexible Two-Phase Heat Transport Device for Wearable Interfaces

The recent development of wearable interfaces raises the challenge of their thermal management requirements. Motivated by that, a novel flexible loop heat pipe (FLHP) of high heat transfer efficiency to be mounted on wearable devices is presented. Initially, the design of the FLHP is caried out by a constructed thermal analysis model. The FLHP is then formed from PDMS by a developed microfabrication process. A proof of concept FLHP prototype with dimension of 80×45×1.2 mm with high flexibility is obtained. The thermal performance test was conducted at three different heat loads. The results show the FLHP operates successfully with promising potential to be applied on wearable electronics or any other flexible MEMS applications.