Capillary Evaporator for Thermal Management of High Power Density Electronic Components

Creare is developing an innovative capillary-based evaporator component for direct cooling of advanced electronic modules and for interfacing with capillary pumped thermal management loops for spacecraft. A reentrant capillary structure design will increase by an order of magnitude the pumping capacity of the capillary surface. Compared with current porous wick evaporators, this evaporator will have four advantages: (1)capillary pumping head 2 to 3 times larger, (2)much lower hydraulic pressure losses in the liquid transport channels, (3)much simpler geometry allowing for easier design and analysis of performance for system applications, and (4) high effective thermal conductance per unit area (50 to 100 W/cm2 degrees Celsius) to handle high power densities. The combination of high pumping capacity and high thermal conductance will result in compact, low weight thermal management systems for cooling electronics on spacecraft. Use of this evaporator in a capillary pumped loop applied to a wide range of satellite applications, including advanced radar satellites of interest to SDIO and Air Force and for EOS satellites. Another commerical application of great potential is the development of a high heat flux cold plate for cooling rack-mounted electronics.