Cooling Systems for Electronics in Confined Spaces

The increasingly dense design and construction of current and future electronic systems make the problem of removing heat from electronic components and assemblies in confined spaces common to many applications. Irvine Sensors Corporation is proposing to design, build and demonstrate a thermal management system for electronics in confined spaces. The proposed thermal management system is the Micropump/Microchannel Cooling System (MMRC) which is a MEMS based device that is directly attached to high power components to remove the heat generated in them by driving cooling fluid through microchannels in the device. The enabling technology in the MMCS is a novel micropump approach that allows fluid circulation through the microchannels and in the cooling system while maintaining low fluid pressure. This is in contrast with other microchannel based cooling devices that require high pressure circulation pumps to maintain the required fluid flow rate.