Advanced Electronic Cooling Technologies

This proposal addresses the development of a self-contained and low-power thermal management system for cooling electronic components, that is applicable to military systems that employ high-power electronics, including spacecraft, aircraft and directed energy weapons. This Phase I SBIR program has two parts. The first part involves the development of a detailed requirements document and a feasibility study for a thermal management system. The proposed technology will heavily leverage a system which was developed to address the increasing thermal management needs of commercial electronics components and has the potential to be extended to meet all of the requirements identified in the solicitation. The feasibility study will assess the ability of the current system to satisfy the requirements and identify the limitations of the system in the context of the desired system performance parameters for higher-power military applications. The second part involves the development of a subscale prototype of a system which meets these requirements, including analysis and hardware development of a demonstrator experiment. Risks associated with the development of the full-scale system and all of its components will be identified and risk reduction plans defined for Phase II. BENEFIT: The thermal management solution which will be developed under this SBIR will provide a lower power, compact, scalable, self-contained system which is capable of cooling high powered military electronics and power generation equipment. It will be robust and durable enough for long term survival in the harsh operating environments of aircraft, satellites, launch vehicles, and military combat vehicles. The system will be optimized for weight and volume and be modular so that it can be easily augmented for future requirements. Military applications include: avionics cooling for F-22, F-35 and HALE aircraft; electronics systems cooling for the Armys Future Combat System fleet of military vehicles; airborne and space-based optical systems; solid state lasers and directed energy weapon power components. The system will have a natural migration to other less extreme commercial applications; in particular the cooling of desktop and laptop computers where the heat dissipation needs are continually climbing and no long term, scalable solutions exists in the marketplace.