Art and Science Towards Noiseless Driving of Liquid Metal for Advanced Thermal Management of High Heat Flux Device

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Liu ◽  
Zhong-Shan Deng ◽  
Zhi-Zhu He
Keyword(s):  
Heat Flux ◽  
Liquid Metal ◽  
Thermal Management ◽  
High Heat ◽  
Low Noise ◽  
High Heat Flux ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Typical Application ◽  
Liquid Metal Cooling ◽  
Metal Coolant

The room temperature liquid metal cooling is quickly emerging as a powerful way for the thermal management in many advanced high heat flux devices, spanning from electronics, optoelectronics, battery, to power system etc. Except for its pretty high conductivity that a metal coolant could offer, the unique merit lying behind this new generation cooling strategy is its drivability of the highly conductive coolant through the electromagnetic effect where no moving elements are involved and thus only very few energy consumption is needed. In addition, even waste heat could be strong enough to generate applicable electricity for such flow driving purpose. More directly, the temperature gradient intrinsically generated between the heat source and the sink has also been managed to drive the flow of the coolant and realize an automatic practical enough cooling in some situations. All these practices lead to a totally noiseless pumping of the heat delivery and a compact and reliable cooling modular can thus be possible. Starting from this basic point, we are dedicated here to present an overview on the art and science in developing the technical strategies for a smart driving of the liquid metal cooling of the target devices. Designing philosophy for an innovated thermal management will be discussed. Particularly, electromagnetic pumping, waste thermoelectricity driving, thermosyphon flow effect, etc. will be comparatively evaluated with each of the working performances interpreted. Power consumption rate and efficiency will be quantitatively digested. Typical application examples in the cooling of a series of device areas will be illustrated. Further improvement on the cooling solution along this category will be suggested. Challenging issues in pushing the new technology into large scale utilization will be raised. It is expected that such silent self-driving of the liquid metal coolant will find unique and important values in a wide variety of thermal management areas where reliability, compactness, low noise and energy saving are urgently requested.

Design of Practical Liquid Metal Cooling Device for Heat Dissipation of High Performance CPUs

2010 ◽  
Vol 132 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yueguang Deng ◽  
Jing Liu
Keyword(s):  
Heat Flux ◽  
Liquid Metal ◽  
Thermal Resistance ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Heat Dissipation ◽  
High Heat ◽  
High Heat Flux ◽  
Water Cooling ◽  
Cooling Device ◽  
Liquid Metal Cooling

Broad societal needs have focused attention on technologies that can effectively dissipate huge amount of heat from high power density electronic devices. Liquid metal cooling, which has been proposed in recent years, is fast emerging as a novel and promising solution to meet the requirements of high heat flux optoelectronic devices. In this paper, a design and implementation of a practical liquid metal cooling device for heat dissipation of high performance CPUs was demonstrated. GaInSn alloy with the melting point around 10°C was adopted as the coolant and a tower structure was implemented so that the lowest coolant amount was used. In order to better understand the design procedure and cooling capability, several crucial design principles and related fundamental theories were demonstrated and discussed. In the experimental study, two typical prototypes have been fabricated to evaluate the cooling performance of this liquid metal cooling device. The compared results with typical water cooling and commercially available heat pipes show that the present device could achieve excellent cooling capability. The thermal resistance could be as low as 0.13°C/W, which is competitive with most of the latest advanced CPU cooling devices in the market. Although the cost (about 70 dollars) is still relatively high, it could be significantly reduced to less than 30 dollars with the optimization of flow channel. Considering its advantages of low thermal resistance, capability to cope with extremely high heat flux, stability, durability, and energy saving characteristic when compared with heat pipe and water cooling, this liquid metal cooling device is quite practical for future application.

Recent Advancement on Liquid Metal Cooling for Thermal Management of Computer Chip

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Liu ◽  
Yue-Guang Deng ◽  
Zhong-Shan Deng
Keyword(s):  
Liquid Metal ◽  
Thermal Management ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Air Cooling ◽  
Liquid Metal Coolant ◽  
Cooling Device ◽  
Chip Cooling ◽  
Cooling Method ◽  
Liquid Metal Cooling ◽  
Metal Coolant

Efficient cooling of a high performance computer chip has been an extremely important however becoming more and more tough issue. The recently invented liquid metal cooling method is expected to pave the way for high flux heat dissipation which is hard to tackle otherwise by many existing conventional cooling strategies. However, as a new thermal management method, its application also raised quite a few challenging fundamental and practical issues for solving. To illustrate the development of the new technology, this talk is dedicated to present an overview on the latest advancements made in the author’s lab in developing the new generation chip cooling device based on the liquid metal coolant with melting point around room temperature. The designing and optimization of the cooling device and component will be discussed. Several major barriers to prevent the new method from practical application such as erosion between liquid metal coolant and its substrate material will be outlined with good solutions clarified. Performance comparison between the new chip cooling method with commercially available products with highest quality such as air cooling, water cooling and heat pipe cooling devices were evaluated. Typical examples of using liquid metal cooling for the thermal management of a real PC or even super computer will be demonstrated. Further, miniaturizations on the prototype device by extending it as a MEMS cooling device or mini/micro channel liquid metal cooling device will also be explained. Along with the development of the hardware, some fundamental heat transfer issues in characterizing the liquid metal cooling device will be discussed through numerical or analytical model. Future challenging issues in pushing the new technology into large scale practices will be raised. From all the outputs obtained so far, it can be clearly seen that the new cooling strategy will find very promising and significant applications in a wide variety of engineering situations whenever thermal managements or heat transport are needed.

Site-Specific and On-Demand High Heat-Flux Cooling Using Superlattice Based Thin-Film Thermoelectrics

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ihtesham Chowdhury ◽  
Ravi Prasher ◽  
Kelly Lofgreen ◽  
Sridhar Narasimhan ◽  
Ravi Mahajan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Thin Film ◽  
Heat Flux ◽  
Thermal Management ◽  
High Performance ◽  
High Heat ◽  
Thermoelectric Device ◽  
High Heat Flux ◽  
General Will ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Fully Integrated

We have recently reported the first ever demonstration of active cooling of hot-spots of >1 kW/cm2 in a packaged electronic chip using thin-film superlattice thermoelectric cooler (TEC) cooling technology [1]. In this paper, we provide a detailed account of both experimental and theoretical aspects of this technological demonstration and progress. We have achieved cooling of as much as 15°C at a location on the chip where the heat-flux is as high as ∼1300 W/cm2, with the help of a thin-film TEC integrated into the package. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of high heat-flux cooling with a thin-film thermoelectric device made from superlattices when it is fully integrated into a usable electronic package. Our results, which validate the concept of site-specific micro-scale cooling of electronics in general, will have significant potential for thermal management of future generations of microprocessors. Similar active thermal management could also be relevant for high-performance solid-state lasers and power electronic chips.

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