Multiple Fan-Heat Sink Cooling System With Enhanced Evaporator Base: Design, Modeling, and Experiment

Abstract

A cooling device using stacked centrifugal fans and circular heat sinks was designed for cooling a semiconductor chip with a heat flux near 125 W/cm2. In this device, heat is conducted from the chip to a copper heat distribution block and then distributed to multiple heat sinks via four heat pipes. The copper block with embedded heat pipes or evaporator block was optimized using finite element analysis, and several cases were validated with experimental data. The experiments showed great benefits by having a second fan/heat sink in the device. The copper block by itself was found to contribute more than half of the overall thermal resistance of the cooling device. The thermal spreading resistance of the block can be reduced by about 70% if a piece of high-conductivity material, such as a diamond-copper composite, is inserted into its base. The thermal spreading resistance is generally lower when the thickness of the high-conductivity base piece increases. However, the analysis shows that the benefit of using a high-conductivity base tapers off as the thickness of the base piece nears the diameter of the heat pipes (δ∗=1) and weakly worsens after (δ∗>1). The base will also not have a benefit when the size of the chip approaches that of the copper block (A∗=1).