Volume 9: Sustainable Energy Solutions for Changing the World: Part I

Numerical Investigations of the Junction Temperature at Different Cold Plate Design configurations with and without Thermal Interface Material Thamer Khalif Salem , Mohammed Ridha Jawad Al-Tameemi , Zhibin Yu

Abstract

Cold plates are one of the most commonly used cooling methods in compact electronics circuits. This cooling system operates through conduction and forced convection heat transfer. To identify the optimum design of a cold plate that can dissipate up to 100 W/cm2 of heat generated from an electronic chip, three models are proposed and analyzed theoretically. Star CCM and EES program are used to conduct the simulation. In model 1 and 2, the cold plate material is Aluminum, while Copper is used in model 3. The use of thermal interface material (TIM) was also investigated and compare to a similar model without TIM. In addition, the effects of various design parameters on the junction temperature have been studied. The results show that using Copper as a cold plate material with a pipe diameter of 8 mm have resulted in 16.3 % reduction in junction temperature compared to model 1. The validation is performed by comparing results obtained from both software for model 1 without TIM, which showed a good agreement between them

Keywords TIM, Cold plate material and geometry, Numerical analysis, Junction temperature.