Heat Pipe Enhanced Card Frames

October 1, 2012

Advanced Cooling Technologies’ (ACT) (Lancaster, PA) high conductivity (k) VME and VPX frames feature embedded heat pipes to greatly increase heat transfer. This includes a technique to embed heat pipes that allow for thickness as low as 0.072".

In military embedded computing applications the market trend is to pack more high-power components onto electronics cards without adjusting the volume for cooling within the card chassis. The typical thermal path is to conduct from components to the wedge lock, and through the wedge lock into the chassis for dissipation via natural convection, forced convection, or liquid flow. This creates a large emphasis on getting heat from the components to the wedge lock. With heat pipe enhanced (HiK) frames, the overall thermal conductivity (k) greatly exceeds standard aluminum or copper frames. Thermal conductivity of these HiK VME cards ranges from 500 W/m-K to 1,000 W/m-K depending on geometry. In addition, the heat pipes can be routed along the wedge lock to create uniform distribution at that interface providing additional temperature reduction from card to chassis.