Design, Fabrication, and Performance Evaluation of a Hybrid Wick Vapor Chamber

Abstract

The growing electrification of transportation systems is dramatically increasing the waste heat that must be dissipated from high-density power electronics. Transformative embedded heat spreading technologies must be developed in next-generation systems to enable air cooling of power semiconductors with heat fluxes exceeding 500 W/cm2 over large hotspot areas up to 1 cm2. In this study, vapor chamber heat spreaders, or thermal ground planes (TGPs), with customized wick structures are investigated as one possibility. A 10 cm × 10 cm TGP with hybrid wick, which is a blend of a biporous wick with a standard monoporous wick, was designed. The TGP was tested in combination with a straight pin fin heat sink under air jet impingement and a 1 cm2 size heat source. The experimental performance of the hybrid wick TGP was compared under the same air-cooled conditions with an off-the-shelf TGP of the same size from a commercial vendor and a TGP with a biporous wick only. The customized hybrid wick TGP exhibits ∼28% lower thermal resistance compared with a traditional commercial TGP, and the capillary limit heat flux is measured as 450 W/cm2. Technical challenges in extending this capillary limit heat flux value and TGP integration into packaged electronics are described.