Mainstream Engineering Corporation (Mainstream) will create a distributed cooling system based on advanced microscale cooling technologies. The proposed design will reject 28.5% more heat than an embedded thermoelectric heat pump scheme given the same rejection temperature. Additionally, the power input to this system is at least an order of magnitude lower than the thermoelectric solution. All components within the proposed design have been in space based systems for decades with long lifetimes. The proposed system will also have very simple controls and can accommodate nearly any PWB design. In the Phase I effort, Mainstream will not only simulate its performance, but it will experimentally confirm the computational findings.
Benefit: The development of the integrated cooling system for high powered computing/power electronics is a thriving field with the ever increasing power density increases and massive parallelization of modern computing. The proposed system has applications in satellite IC cooling, clusters for CFD and FEA analyses, data centers, high powered diagnostic electronics, amplifiers, and power electronics. The market for all of these applications is very large, and wide reaching. The results of the proposed effort will enable the creation of a design tool for cooling devices for small ICs.
Keywords: Advanced Microscale Cooling, Microchannels, Pumped Loops, Hot-Spot Cooling
