COOLING ENHANCEMENT OF A MULTI-WICK VAPOR CHAMBER

摘要

Conventional heatsinks are commonly used owing to their reliability, low-cost and simplicity. However, it is difficult to be successful utilized in applications with high heatflow and heatflux requirements owing to design constraints to maintain high cooling to heating area ratio. Vapor chambers, which could easily adopt the outline of conventional heatsink, with reduced thermal resistance while maintaining the advantages of large area ratio and orientational independence, is one promising potential candidate as the replacement of heatsink in this application although it has yet to penetrate the market. The objective of this manuscript is to present one contributing factor, the design of wick structure that has greatly limited the success of vapor chamber. The large cooling area to heating area ratio leads to the patent pending Multi-Wick structure to cope with the differences in the evaporation and condensation fluxes. Measured data on vapor chambers with different wicking features adopting a BTX Type II cooler configuration showed that relative to a bare chamber, the utilization of a Multi-Wick o structure enabled a 39 C temperature reduction at the heat source (100W @ 25mm x25mm).