Graphite Foam Thermal Management of a High Packing Density Array of Power Amplifiers

Abstract

Much focus has been placed on the thermal management of electronics in recent years. An overall reduction in size of electronic components as well as advances in chip technology, leading to ever higher power dissipation, have increased the necessity for innovative cooling designs. While computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software packages have been instrumental in the design of cooling systems, it remains important to validate these CFD predictions through experimentation. The present work focuses on the experimental evaluation of several variations of an air cooled base plate channel design for an array of generic power amplifier modules. In the current study two materials, graphite foam and a microfibrous material, are investigated as mini-heat exchangers to be implemented in the cooling channel of the base plate. Computational simulations have been conducted on some of the proposed designs in order to evaluate certain parameters. Experiments were conducted measuring chip temperatures and the pressure drop across the cooling channel. Effective heat transfer coefficients were also reverse engineered.