Development and experimental study of a 3-dimensional enhanced heat pipe radiator for cooling high-power electronic devices

Abstract

A 3-dimensional enhanced heat pipe radiator (HPR) is developed to meet the requirements of heat dissipation and temperature uniformity in the cooling of high-power electronic components. The radiator is composed of a conventional flat heat pipe base and roll-bond flat heat pipe fins, which can enhance heat transfer in three dimensions. By means of experiments, the heat transfer characteristic is firstly studied under different filling ratios for a single roll bond flat heat pipe. Then, a comparison is performed of the heat transfer performance between the HPR and the conventional aluminum fin radiator (CAFR) under different heating powers and wind speed conditions experimentally. In this research, HPR demonstrates obvious advantages in the heat transfer. Results show that the optimum filling ratio is 35% for the roll-bond flat heat pipe. The start-up time of HPR is shorter (25 mins), and the start-up performance is not affected by power variation. HPR has a low thermal resistance of less than 0.48 °C/W compared with CAFR, which can effectively control the heat source temperature difference is about 1.7 °C–1.8 °C. The maximum heat dissipation of HPR and CAFR is almost the same under natural convection condition. But when the wind speed is 4 m/s, the maximum heat dissipation of HPR increased by 58.2% compared to the maximum heat dissipation of CAFR.