High Heat Flux Cooling Module Rosette for Power Amplifier Thermal Solution

"MicroEnergy Technologies, Inc. (MicroET) proposes to demonstrate the feasibility and the major advantages of an innovative electronic cooling system with substrate-integrated ceramic (e.g., SiC) microchannels in which a ceramic nanoparticles suspension(i.e., SiC nanofluid coolant) is driven using a unique pumping approach to yield high intensity heat removal from the substrate. The particular thermal management system addresses the DoD requirements for cooling of power electronics where it is to becompatible with SiC and GaN based wide bandgap semiconductor microwave amplifiers. The heat transfer within the self-contained cooling module is high because of two key reasons, namely, high surface area of the microchannel surface geometry for efficientheat rejection to the coolant and very high heat transfer coefficients induced by the SiC nanofluid coolant. Combining these two effects is expected to produce heat rejection rates significantly higher than 1000 W/cm2 from the surface of the substrate tobe cooled with pumping pressure drops of less than 1000 Pa (or less than 10 mW/cm2 of substrate surface area pumping power requirements) . In the proposed phase I work we intend to demonstrate a specific application of nanofluids where the morphology ofthe particles and the rheology of the mixture have major impact on the system performance. Based on our collective experience in thermal systems miniaturization, we believe SiC nanopartic