Thermal Management of a High Packing Density Array of Power Amplifiers Using Liquid Cooling

The increasing demand for smaller more compact electronic systems as well as the need to handle higher levels of power dissipation has lead to an increase in necessity for more innovative cooling designs. In recent years, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software has been used extensively in the design of thermal control systems for electronics. In many cases, there remains a need for experimental evaluation of cooling systems in order to validate the results of the CFD simulations. The present work investigates several variations of a liquid cooled base plate channel design for an array of generic power amplifier units. Several different channel insert configurations are investigated as miniheat exchangers using both copper fins and graphite foam. Experiments were conducted measuring the chip temperatures as well as the inlet liquid temperature. CFD simulations were also conducted to guide the experimental program. Effective heat transfer coefficients were also reverse-engineered using CFD software and the experimental results.