Light Weight High Performance Thermal Management With Advanced Heat Sinks and Extended Surfaces

Thermal management is a critical and essential component of maintaining high efficiency and reliability of electronic components. Adequate cooling must be provided while meeting the weight and volumetric requirements, especially for passive air-cooling solutions in avionics applications where space and weight are at a premium. It should be noted that there are electronic systems where thermal solution contributes 95% or more to the total weight of the system. With recent advancements in material science and increase in demand for more aggressive cooling solutions, it has become critical to invent, manufacture, characterize, and implement advanced thermal materials for the design of compact and low weight systems. However, because of the complexity due to anisotropic properties of these materials, their thermal performances and reliability are yet to be fully understood. The present paper aims at characterization of advanced thermal materials in passive air-cooling applications. A combined computational and experimental investigation is performed on various advanced heat sink materials and manufactured prototypes. Results are compared with the traditionally used aluminum heat sink and showed that significant weight savings can potentially be achieved. A composite figure of merit is proposed for measuring mass effective cooling capabilities of heat sinks. It is defined as the cooling performance per unit mass of heat sink and shown that advanced materials can perform as much as ten times better than conventional aluminum heat sinks.