Vascularized liquid metal cooling for thermal management of kW high power laser diode array

Abstract

In this paper, the vascularized liquid metal cooling was introduced into the thermal management of high power laser diode array (HPLDA) to realize an excellent heat removal performance. A vascularized liquid metal heat sink, with channel number of 70 and characteristic dimension of 1.8 mm, was firstly designed. And experimental tests and numerical analysis were then conducted. The experimental results indicated that liquid metal cooling can achieve 2000 W heat dissipation of HPLDA, with maximum temperature of heat sink top surface lower than 54 °C. The numerical results showed that vascularized liquid metal cooling offers better cooling performance compared to vascularized water cooling when flow rate was bigger than 2.4 l/min. It was also found that the heat capacity resistance was a significant thermal resistance for vascularized liquid metal cooling, while it was rather small for vascularized water cooling. Finally, the optimization distribution of heat source was numerically conducted to reduce the maximum temperature and maximum temperature difference, and 40 mm * 72 mm HPLDA distribution was selected as the best choice. Overall, the advanced vascularized liquid metal convection cooling offers a novel and effective heat dissipation method for the thermal management of HPLDA.