Heat Pipe Design Guidelines for Better Thermal Designs

Aug. 18, 2023

This presentation delves into heat pipes and vapor chambers that might benefit your application.

This article/video are part of the TechXchange: Cool Designs.

This presentation was given by Celsia's CEO, George Meyer, at ThermalLIVE in 2016.

Embedded electronics generate heat. Sometimes the amount of heat is significant and cannot be dissipated easily within the confines of a system. Fans and heatsinks can often mitigate thermal issues but in many cases more robust alternatives like heat pipes are needed to move the energy to a place where it can be dissipated effectively.

Celsia is a company that specializes in designing systems to handle these more challenging designs. Not all thermal solutions are the same and often they require custom implementations. Understanding the ins and outs of heat pipes and vapor chambers is a good starting point, especially if you're unfamiliar with the terminology and issues involved in designing such a system.

Chapters

0:00 - Making Hot Technology Cooler
6:03 - Phase Rules of Thumb
8.19 - Phase Similarity: Wick Structures
11:15 - Phase Device Similarity
13:42 - Phase: Effective Thermal Conductivity
14:53 - Phase Differences: Overview
17:54 - When Moving Heat to a Remote Sink
19:10 - When Spreading Heat to a Local Sink
22:51 - Bending & Shaping
28:48 - Heat Exchanger Designs (Fins)
29.32 - Assembly Attachment
30:25 - Thermal Solution Design Process
31:20 - Heat Sink Volumetric Calculation
34:25 - CFD Analysis and Prototyping

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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