Evaporative Thermal Performance of Vapor Chambers Under Nonuniform Heating Conditions

Abstract

This paper reports the test results of vapor chambers using copper post heaters and silicon die heaters. Experiments were conducted to understand the effects of nonuniform heating conditions (hot spots) on the evaporative thermal performance of vapor chambers. In contrast to the copper post heater, which provides ideal heating, a silicon chip package was developed to replicate more realistic heat source boundary conditions of microprocessors. The vapor chambers were tested for hot spot heat fluxes as high as 746 W/cm2. The experimental results show that evaporator thermal resistance is not sensitive to nonuniform heat conditions, i.e., it is the same as in the uniform heating case. In addition, a model was developed to predict the effective thickness of a sintered-wick layer saturated with water at the evaporator. The model assumes that the pore sizes in the sintered particle wick layer are distributed nonuniformly. With an increase of heat flux, liquid in the larger size pores are dried out first, followed by drying of smaller size pores. Statistical analysis of the pore size distribution is used to calculate the fraction of the pores that remain saturated with liquid at a given heat flux condition. The model successfully predicts the experimental results of evaporative thermal resistance of vapor chambers for both uniform and nonuniform heat fluxes.