Thermal Management Using Spider-Shaped Heat Pipe for High Power Electronic Cooling

Heat pipes are mainly used to carry heat from a compact region to a broad space to keep the hot spot in an allowable temperature range with high reliability via passive cooling. In military electronics, due to high-speed processors, dissipated heat can be very high that needs extra attention to pay to get a successful and reliable product. In this study, 65W heat generated in a multicore-CPU is cooled using a spider-shaped heat pipe configuration to keep the core temperature of CPU below 105°C. Four copper-water sintered heat pipes with 5 mm in diameter are used in a complex shape, which is similar to the legs of a spider to share the heat load among them and carry it from the CPU to the edge of the cold plate of 3U standard Euro size PCB. To get an insight, initial thermal analysis has been conducted with three different cold plate designs, which are pure aluminium alloy, pure copper and heat pipes embedded aluminium cold plates. All studies with the heat pipes are experimentally tested and results are compared with that of pure copper cold plate design. As a result, it is seen that considering the Size, Weight and Power requirement, compared to pure copper, it is thermally more advantageous to use embedded spider-shaped heat pipes for the cooling of the critical card to cool the CPU as much as possible. In addition, for the mass production, a repeatability test is done with manufactured 40 SSHP cold plates.