High Performance Low Mass Nanowire Enabled Heatpipe

Heat pipes are widely used for passive, two-phase electronics cooling. As advanced high power, high performance electronics in space based and terrestrial applications produce ever increasing heat fluxes, heat pipes with improved thermal capacity are sought. Illuminex Corporation has demonstrated that using copper nanowire arrays as the wick in heat pipes increases the heat transfer capabilities. Phase I developed processing techniques to engineer copper nanowire arrays on copper sheet that were subsequently incorporated into vapor chamber style heat pipes as the wicking material at the evaporator region. In Phase II, the program will be advanced to manufacture large area copper sheets fully covered with nanowires on one side. This material will be used to construct the entire heat pipe, package and wick. This will enable the development of high performance, lightweight, low-profile (< 1 mm) heat pipes with enhanced thermal transfer properties. The decrease in weight and size is desirable for NASA space projects and will find commercial application in radar systems, servers, and portable electronic devices. The use of less material in heat pipe manufacture will result in lower production costs while the superior performance and smaller size will provide electronic system designers with greater flexibility in thermal management system design.