Flow Rate Impact on the Thermal Management for an Array of Power Amplifiers Using Liquid Cooling

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software has been extensively employed in the design of thermal management systems for electronics. There continues to be a need for experimental evaluation of thermal management systems in order to validate the results of the CFD simulations. This primarily experimental research explores several heat transfer enhancing inserts for a liquid cooled base plate channel design applied to an array of generic power amplifier units. Several different channel insert configurations (both geometric and material type) are investigated as mini-heat exchangers using both copper fins and graphite foam. Experimental data were recorded measuring the chip temperatures as a function of volume flow rate. CFD simulations were also conducted to guide the experimental program. Effective convective heat transfer coefficients were likewise reverse-engineered using CFD software and the experimental measurements. This work has a focus on the cooling liquid volume flow rate impact on the thermal management of a high packing density array of power amplifiers using liquid cooling .