High Temperature Lightweight Heat Pipes for Solid-State Power Amplifier Thermal Management

ABSTRACT: Advanced Cooling Technologies, Inc. (ACT) proposes to develop a novel, and significantly lower cost approach for manufacturing lightweight thermal management solution to address the high heat flux and temperature of next generation GaN power amplifiers or phased arrays. Current power amplifiers are limited in output by the heat flux and temperature capabilities of the overall thermal management system. In order to enable higher output devices it is critical to reduce the heat flux on the thermal management system by spreading the heat efficiently across a larger area. The use of high-temperature electronics such as the next generation of GaN power amplifiers allows operation up to 150 C with adequate higher radiator temperatures and significantly smaller radiator size/mass, due to the biquadratic nature of radiation heat transfer for heat rejection. A lightweight high temperature thermal management concept is proposed to minimize the resultant temperature drop such that the radiator size will further decrease, since the required thermal radiator panel size will be reduced at higher rejection temperature.; BENEFIT: All satellites will benefit from high temperature electronics by utilizing the biquadratic nature of radiation heat transfer to reduce radiator mass/size such as systems that utilize phased arrays. Also, commercial spacecraft, aircraft, and ground vehicles will benefit through increased bandwidth and higher heat load/power payloads. The proposed thermal management solution by ACT will permit the use of these high temperature electronics, which will be greatly simplifying thermal system design.