Investigation of Grooved Heat Pipe Embedded Cold Plate Design with Additive Manufacturing

Heat pipes that offer passive thermal management are frequently used for reliability. They can be used to carry heat through, as well as to increase the thermal conductivity of the base material. In the traditional method, externally produced heat pipes are embedded in another material with intermediate processes. Thanks to the advances in Additive Manufacturing (AM) Technology, it has become possible to produce products with a high thermal performance by producing cold plates with heat pipes inside. In this study, a heat pipe embedded cold plate used to cool an electronic card designed for military application was investigated. As the cold plate design target, the aim is to have aluminum's weight and copper's thermal performance. Weight affected thermal performance criteria are defined to compare the cold plates. In order to evaluate the thermal performance of the product during the design phase, thermal analysis was performed for a 6U-sized cold plate with a high thermal load of 100W. Aluminum, copper base materials, and groove-type heat pipe embedded aluminum are selected as cold plate materials. As a result of these analyses, the desired performance can be obtained by keeping the performance of the heat pipes in aluminum above 1500 W/mK. As a result, it is possible to achieve a lighter cold plate design with high thermal conductivity, produced in one piece with additive manufacturing.