Experimental Investigation of a Cost Effective Skived Microchannel Cold Plate for Mass Production

Abstract

A liquid cold plate that utilizes skived microchannels has been developed to gain the benefits of direct liquid cooling, but minimize the expensive cost of such cold plates. The construction, application, and experimental results of the skived cold plate will be presented. Skiving is a mechanical process that cuts thin layers of material. It is an established process for making air cooled heat sinks. In this application, the fin field is skived and placed inside a housing that allows for liquid flow through the resulting fins. The design boundary conditions and parameters will be described and performance per cost metric will be presented and used to evaluate future optimization possibilities. The objective of the present work was to minimize the thermal resistance while maintaining a low manufacturing cost. The design goal was to produce a cold plate that had sufficient thermal performance and the ability to be mass produced at a reasonable cost. The resulting cold plate would also need to support warm water cooling of microprocessors. Warm water is a working fluid that has not been chilled below ambient temperatures. Therefore, the water temperature could be up to 45 degrees Celsius. The cold plate had a thermal resistance less than 0.3 °Ccm2/W. The pressure drop was minimized to lower the required pumping power and was less than 6 kPa at 1.0 liter per minute. Using a skiving process, it is possible to develop a cold plate that delivers good thermal performance and maintains a low production cost.