High-Performance Hybrid Electronic Enclosure

The power levels of avionics and vetronics have increased with each successive generation of air, space and ground vehicles. The corresponding approaches to thermal management, including liquid cooling and spray cooling, have resulted in more complex designs, higher costs and increased weight. SpaceWorks will develop a lightweight avionics enclosure design to take advantage of the higher specific strength, stiffness and thermal conductivity of graphite fiber composites and pyrolytic graphite materials. A low-cost molding process will be used to produce a lightweight structural component with embedded high-conductivity pyrolytic graphite inserts and internal passages for coolant flow. The resulting single-piece item replaces several individual components for reduced weight, parts count and assembly costs. During the Phase I project, SpaceWorks will develop a conceptual design for a liquid-cooled enclosure that accommodates a standard circuit-card form-factor, such as VME, cPCI or SEM-E. SpaceWorks will fabricate a proof-of-concept part and perform thermal and structural testing to demonstrate improved thermal transport, structural integrity and reduced cost.