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This dissertation is focused on studying transport behavior in vapor chambers at ultra-thin form factors so that their use as heat spreaders can be extended to applications with extreme space constraints. Both the steady-state and transient thermal transport behaviors of vapor chambers are studied. The steady-state section presents an experimental characterization technique, methodologies for the design of the vapor chamber wick structure, and a working fluid selection procedure. The transient section develops a low-cost, 3D, transient semi-analytical transport model, which is used to explore the transient thermal behavior of thin vapor chambers: 1) The key mechanisms governing the transient behavior are identified and experimentally validated; 2) the transient performance of a vapor chamber relative to a copper heat spreader of the same external dimensions is explored and key performance thresholds are identified; and 3) practices are developed for the design of vapor chambers under transient conditions. These analyses have been tailored to ultra-thin vapor chamber geometries, focusing on the application of heat spreading in mobile electronic devices. Compared to the conventional scenarios of use for vapor chambers, this application is uniquely characterized by compact spaces, low and transient heat input, and heat rejection via natural convection.

Future defense, aerospace and automotive technologies involve electronic systems that release high pulsed waste heat like during high power microwave and laser diode applications in tactical and combat aircraft, and electrical and electronic systems in hybrid electric vehicles, which will require the development of an efficient thermal management system. A key design issue is the need for fast charging so as not to overheat the key components. The goal of this work is to study the fabrication and technology implementation feasibility of a novel high energy storage, high heat flux passive heat sink. Key focus is to verify by theory and experiments, the practicability of using phase change materials as a temporary storage of waste heat for heat sink applications. The reason for storing the high heat fluxes temporarily is to be able to reject the heat at the average level when the heat source is off. Accordingly, a concept of a dual latent heat sink intended for moderate to low thermal duty cycle electronic heat sink applications is presented. This heat sink design combines the features of a vapor chamber with rapid thermal energy storage employing graphite foam inside the heat storage facility along with phase change materials and is attractive owing to its passive operation unlike some of the current thermal management techniques for cooling of electronics employing forced air circulation or external heat exchangers. In addition to the concept, end-application dependent criteria to select an optimized design for this dual latent heat sink are presented. A thermal resistance concept based design tool/model has been developed to analyze and optimize the design for experiments. The model showed that it is possible to have a dual latent heat sink design capable of handling 7 MJ of thermal load at a heat flux of 500 W/cm2 (over an area of 100 cm2) with a volume of 0.072 m3 and weighing about 57.5 kg. It was also found that with such high heat flux absorption capability, the proposed conceptual design could have a vapor-to-condenser temperature difference of less than 10 0C with a volume storage density of 97 MJ/m3 and a mass storage density of 0.122 MJ/kg. The effectiveness of this heat sink depends on the rapidness of the heat storage facility in the design during the pulse heat generation period of the duty cycle. Heat storage in this heat sink involves transient simultaneous laminar film condensation of vapor and melting of an encapsulated phase change material in graphite foam. Therefore, this conjugate heat transfer problem including the wall inertia effect is numerically analyzed and the effectiveness of the heat storage mechanism of the heat sink is verified. An effective heat capacity formulation is employed for modeling the phase change problem and is solved using finite element method. The results of the developed model showed that the concept is effective in preventing undue temperature rise of the heat source. Experiments are performed to investigate the fabrication and implementation feasibility and heat transfer performance for validating the objectives of the design i.e., to show that the VCTES heat sink is practicable and using PCM helps in arresting the vapor temperature rise in the heat sink. For this purpose, a prototype version of the VCTES heat sink is fabricated and tested for thermal performance. The volume foot-print of the vapor chamber is about 6"X5"X2.5". A custom fabricated thermal energy storage setup is incorporated inside this vapor chamber. A heat flux of 40 W/cm2 is applied at the source as a pulse and convection cooling is used on the condenser surface. Experiments are done with and without using PCM in the thermal energy storage setup. It is found that using PCM as a second latent system in the setup helps in lowering the undue temperature rise of the heat sink system. It is also found that the thermal resistance between the vapor chamber and the thermal energy storage setup, the pool boiling resistance at the heat source in the vapor chamber, the condenser resistance during heat discharging were key parameters that affect the thermal performance. Some suggestions for future improvements in the design to ease its implementation and enhance the heat transfer of this novel heat sink are also presented.

This work investigated a novel vapor chamber for efficient heat spreading and heat removal. A vapor chamber acting as a heat spreader enables for more uniform temperature distribution along the surface of the device being cooled. First, a vapor chamber was studied and compared with the traditional copper heat spreader. The thickness of vapor chamber was kept 1.35 mm which was considered to be ultra-thin vapor chamber. Then, a new geometrical model having graphite foam in vapor space was proposed where the graphite foam material was incorporated in vapor space as square cubes. The effects of incorporating graphite foam in vapor space were compared to the vapor chamber without the embedded graphite foam to investigate the heat transfer performance improvements of vapor chamber by the high thermal conductivity graphite foam. Finally, the effects of various vapor chamber thicknesses were studied through numerical simulations. It was found that thinner vapor chamber (1.35 mm thickness) had better heat transfer performance than thicker vapor chamber (5 mm thickness) because of the extreme high effective thermal conductivities of ultra-thin vapor chamber. Furthermore, the effect of graphite foam on thermal performance improvement was very minor for ultra-thin vapor chamber, but significant for thick vapor chamber. The GF could help reduce the junction temperature by 15-30% in the 5-mm thick vapor chamber. Use of GF embedded vapor chamber could achieve 250-400 Watt per Centimeter square local heat removal for power electronics. The application of this is not only limited to electronic devices but actuator and avionics cooling in aircrafts, thermal management of electronics in directed energy weapon systems, battery thermal management for electric and hybrid vehicles, smart phones cooling, thus covering a wide gamut of heat flux applications.

<div>Thermal management in next generation power electronic devices, radar applications and semiconductor packaging architectures is becoming increasingly challenging due to the need to reject localized high heat fluxes as well as large total powers. Air cooling has been considered as a simple and reliable method for thermal management compared to architectures that incorporate liquid cooling. However, air-cooled heat sinks typically require effective heat spreading to provide the requisite level of area enhancement to dissipate high heat fluxes. Compared to solid metallic heat spreaders, advanced heat sinks that incorporate two-phase heat transfer devices such as vapor chambers can significantly enhance the power dissipation capabilities in such configurations. Vapor chambers are devices that utilize evaporation/boiling processes within a sealed cavity to achieve efficient heat spreading. In high-heat-flux applications, boiling can occur within the internal wick structure of the vapor chamber at the location of the heat input (i.e., the evaporator). The maximum dryout heat flux and thermal resistance of the device is dictated by the resulting two-phase flow and heat transfer in the porous evaporator due to boiling. While various works in the literature have introduced new evaporator wick designs to improve the dryout heat flux during boiling, the enhancement is limited to small, millimeter scale hotspots or at a very high thermal resistance. In additixon, the effective design of such evaporator systems requires mechanistic models that can accurately predict the dryout limit and thermal performance. </div><div> This thesis first explores the usage of a novel ‘two-layer’ evaporator wick for passive high heat flux dissipation over large heater areas at a low thermal resistance. Moreover, a new mechanistic (first principles based) model framework is introduced for dryout limit and thermal performance prediction during boiling in capillary fed evaporators, by considering the resulting simultaneous flow of two phases (liquid and vapor) within the microscale porous media.</div><div> The novel two-layer wick concept uses a thick ‘cap’ layer of porous material to feed liquid to a thin ‘base’ layer through an array of vertical liquid-feeding ‘posts’. Vapor ‘vents’ in the cap layer allow for vapor formed during the boiling process (which is constrained to the base layer) to escape out of the wick. This two-layer structure decouples the functions of liquid resupply and capillary-fed boiling heat transfer, making the design realize high heat flux dissipation greater than 500 W/cm2 over large heat input areas of ~1 cm2. A reduced-order model is first developed to demonstrate the performance of a vapor chamber incorporating such a two-layer evaporator wick design. The model comprises simplified hydraulic and thermal resistance networks for predicting the capillary-limited maximum heat flux and the overall thermal resistance, respectively. The reduced-order model is validated against a higher fidelity numerical model and then used to analyze the performance of the vapor chamber with varying two-layer wick geometric feature sizes. The fabrication of the proposed two-layer wick is then presented. The thermal performance of the fabricated wicks is characterized using a boiling test facility that utilizes high speed visualization to identify the characteristic regimes of boiling operation in the wicks. The performance is also benchmarked to conventional single-layer wicks. </div><div> It is observed that single-layer wicks exhibit an unfavorable boiling regime where the center of the heater area dries out locally, leading to a high value of thermal resistance. The two-layer wicks avoid local dryout due to the distributed feeding provided by the posts and enhance the dryout heat flux significantly compared to single-layer wicks. A two-layer design that consists of a 10 × 10 array of liquid feeding posts provided a 400% improvement in the dryout heat flux. Following a parametric analysis of the effect of particle size, two-layer wicks composed of 180 – 212 µm particles and a 15 × 15 array of liquid feeding posts yielded a maximum heat flux dissipation of 485 W/cm2 over a 1 cm2 heat input area while also maintaining a low thermal resistance of only ~0.052 K/W. The effect of vapor venting and liquid-feeding areas is also experimentally studied. By understanding these effects, a parametrically optimized design is fabricated and shown to demonstrate an extremely high dryout limit of 512 W/cm2. We identify that the unique area-scalability of the two-layer wick design allows it to achieve an unprecedented combination of high total power and low-thermal-resistance heat dissipation over larger areas than was previously possible in the literature.</div><div> The results from the characterization of two-layer wicks revealed that the overall performance of the design was limited by the boiling process in the thin base wick layer. A fundamental model-based understanding of the resulting two-phase flow and heat transfer process in such thin capillary-fed porous media was still lacking. This lack of a mechanistic model precluded the accurate prediction of dryout heat flux and thermal performance of the two-layer wick. Moreover, such an understanding is needed for the optimal design of advanced hybrid evaporator wicks that leverage capillary-fed boiling. Despite the existence of various experimental works, there are currently no mechanistic approaches that model this behavior. To fill this unmet need, this thesis presents a new semi-empirical model for prediction of dryout and thermal resistance of capillary-fed evaporator systems. Thermal conduction across the solid and volumetric evaporation within the pores are solved to obtain the temperature distribution in the porous structure. Capillary-driven lateral liquid flow from the outer periphery of the evaporator to its center, with vapor flow across the thickness, is considered to obtain the local liquid and vapor pressures. Experiments are conducted on sintered copper particle evaporators of different particle sizes and heater areas to collect data for model calibration. To demonstrate the wider applicability of the model for other types of porous evaporators, the model is further calibrated against a variety of dryout limit and thermal resistance data collected from the literature. The model is shown to predict the experimentally observed trends in the dryout limit with mean particle/pore size, heater size, and evaporator thicknesses. This physics–based modeling approach is then implemented into a vapor chamber model to predict the thermal performance limits of air-cooled heat sinks with embedded vapor chambers. The governing energy and momentum equations of a low-cost analytical vapor chamber modeling approach is coupled with the evaporator model to capture the effect of boiling in the evaporator wick. An example case study illustrating the usage of the model is demonstrated and compared to a purely evaporation-based modeling approach, for quantifying the differences in dryout limit prediction, signifying the need to account for boiling in the evaporator wick. </div><div> The understanding gained from this thesis can be utilized for the prediction of dryout and thermal performance during boiling in capillary limited evaporator systems. The work also suggests the usage of a universal relative permeability correlation for the two-phase flow configuration studied herein for capillary-fed boiling, based on a wide calibration to experimental data. The modeling framework can also be readily leveraged to find novel and unexplored designs of advanced evaporator wicks. From an application standpoint, the new vapor chamber model developed here can be used for the improved estimation of performance limits specifically when high heat fluxes are encountered by the device. This will enable better and informed design of air-cooled heat sink architectures with embedded vapor chambers for high performance applications. </div><div><br></div>

<p>  </p> <p>Heat pipes and vapor chambers are passive two-phase heat transport devices that are used for thermal management in electronics. The passive operation of a heat pipe is facilitated by capillary wicking of the working fluid through a porous wick, and thus is subject to an operational limit in terms of the maximum pressure head that the wick can provide. This operational limit, often termed as the capillary limit, is the maximum heat input at which the pressure drop in the wick is balanced by the maximum capillary pressure head; operating a heat pipe or a vapor chamber above the capillary limit at steady-state leads to dryout. It thus becomes important to predict the performance of heat pipes and vapor chambers and explore the parametric design space to provide guidelines for minimized thermal resistance while satisfying this capillary limit. An increasingly critical aspect is to predict the transient thermal response of vapor chambers. Moreover, heat pipes and vapor chambers are extensively being used in electronic systems where the power input is dictated by the end-user activity and is expected to even exceed the capillary limit for brief time intervals. Thus, it is imperative to understand the behavior of heat pipes and vapor chambers when operated at steady and transient heat loads above the capillary limit as dryout occurs. However, review of the literature on heat pipe performance characterization reveals that the regime of dryout operation has been virtually unexplored, and thus this thesis aims to fill this critical gap in understanding.</p> <p>The design for minimized thermal resistance of a vapor chamber or a heat pipe is guided by the relative contribution of thermal resistance due to conduction across the evaporator wick and the saturation temperature gradient in the vapor core. In the limit of very thin form factors, the contribution from the vapor core thermal resistance dominates the overall thermal resistance of the vapor chamber; recent work has focused on working fluid selection to minimize overall thermal resistance in this limit. However, the wick thermal resistance becomes increasingly significant as its thickness increases to support higher heat inputs while avoiding the capillary limit. A thermal resistance network model is thus utilized to investigate the importance of simultaneously considering the contributions of the wick and vapor core thermal resistances. A generalized approach is proposed for vapor chamber design which allows <em>simultaneous</em> selection of the working fluid and wick that provides minimum overall thermal resistance for a given geometry and operating condition. While the thermal resistance network model provides a convenient method for exploring the design space, it cannot be used to predict 3-D temperature fields in the vapor chamber. Moreover, such thermal resistance network models cannot predict transient performance and temperature evolution for a vapor chamber. Therefore, an easy-to-use approach is proposed for mapping of vapor chamber transport to the heat diffusion equation using a set of appropriately defined effective anisotropic thermophysical properties, thus allowing simulation of vapor chamber as a sold conduction block. This effective anisotropic properties approach is validated against a time-stepping analytical model and is shown to have good match for both spatial and transient temperature predictions.</p> <p>Moving the focus from steady-state and transient operation of vapor chambers, a comprehensive characterization of heat pipe operation above capillary limit is performed. Different user needs and device workloads can lead to highly transient heat loads which could exceed the notional capillary limit for brief time intervals. Experiments are performed to characterize the transient thermal response of a heat pipe subjected to heat input pulses of varying duration that exceed the capillary limit. Transient dryout events due to a wick pressure drop exceeding the maximum available capillary pressure can be detected from an analysis of the measured temperature signatures. It is discovered that under such transient heating conditions, a heat pipe can sustain heat loads higher than the steady-state capillary limit for brief periods of time without experiencing dryout. If the heating pulse is sufficiently long as to induce transient dryout, the heat pipe may experience an elevated steady-state temperature even after the heat load is reduced back to a level lower than the capillary limit. The steady-state heat load must then be reduced to a level much below the capillary limit to fully recover the original thermal resistance of the heat pipe. The recovery process of heat pipes is further investigated, and a mechanism is proposed for the thermal hysteresis observed in heat pipe performance after dryout. A model for <em>steady-state</em> heat pipe transport is developed based on the proposed mechanism to predict the parametric trends of thermal resistance following recovery from dryout-induced thermal hysteresis, and the model is mechanistically validated against experiments. The experimental characterization of the recovery process demonstrates the existence of a maximum hysteresis curve, which serves as the worst-case scenario for thermal hysteresis in heat pipe after dryout. Based on the learnings from the experimental characterization, a new procedure is introduced to experimentally characterize the steady-state dryout performance of a heat pipe.</p> <p>To recover the heat pipe performance under steady-state, it has been shown that the heat input needs to be lowered down or <em>throttled</em> significantly below the capillary limit. However, due to the highly transient nature of power dissipation from electronic devices, it becomes imperative to characterize heat pipe recovery from dryout under transient operations. Hence, power-throttling assisted recovery of heat pipe from dryout has been characterized under transient conditions. A minimum throttling time interval, defined as time-to-rewet, is identified to eliminate dryout induced thermal hysteresis using power throttling. Dependence of time-to-rewet on throttling power is explored, and guidelines are presented to advise the throttling need and choice of throttling power under transient conditions. </p> <p>The experimental characterization of heat pipe operation at pulse loads above the capillary limit and power throttling following the pulse load helped define the dryout and recovery performance of a heat pipe. Next, a physics-based model is developed to predict the heat pipe <em>transient</em> thermal response under dryout-inducing pulse load and power throttling assisted recovery. This novel model considers wick as a partially saturated media with spatially and temporally varying liquid saturation, and accounts for the effect of wick partial saturation in heat pipe transport. The model prediction are validated against experiments with commercial heat pipe samples, and it is shown that the model can accurately predict dryout and recovery characteristics, namely time-to-dryout, time-to-rewet, and dryout-induced thermal hysteresis, for heat pipes with a range of wick types, heat pipe lengths and pulse loads above the capillary limit. </p> <p>The work discussed in this thesis opens certain questions that are expected to guide further research in this area. First, the thermal hysteresis mechanism proposed could be further validated with direct visualization of the liquid in a vapor chamber. To achieve this, X-ray microscopy is proposed as a viable option for the imaging <em>in situ</em> wetting dynamics in a vapor chamber. Second, the model developed to predict the dryout and recovery characteristics of the heat pipe can be used to design heat pipe with improved performance under pulse loads and power throttling. Third, novel wick designs can be explored that utilize the understanding developed of governing mechanisms for recovery from dryout, and can eliminate thermal hysteresis at powers closer to capillary limit. Fourth, the modeling approach can be extended to predict dryout and recovery trends in vapor chamber since the heat transfer pathways in a vapor chamber are different than those of a heat pipe. Fifth, and lastly it was observed several times during experiments that some of the heat pipe samples would exhibit complete dryout (sudden catastrophic rise in temperature and thermal resistance at the point of dryout) whereas other samples would exhibit partial dryout (noticeable but small increase in thermal resistance at dryout) at operating powers just above the capillary limit. Exploring and explaining the cause of complete dryout, in particular, would be an extremely valuable contribution to the heat pipe research. </p> <p>The work discussed in this thesis has led to the comprehensive development of a functional and mechanistic understanding of heat pipe operation above the notional capillary limit. The experimental procedures developed in this work are utilized to characterize a heat pipe performance under dryout and recovery. The models based on the mechanistic understanding developed from experimental characterization of dryout and recovery operation of a heat pipe have been experimentally validated and are useful for predicting heat pipe performance under dryout-inducing pulse loads and power-throttling.   </p>

<p>From idea generation to conceptualization and development of products and technologies is a non-linear and iterative process. The work in this thesis follows a process that initiates with the review of existing technologies and products, examining their unique value proposition in the context of the specific applications for which they are designed. Next, the unmet needs of novel or emerging applications are identified that require new product or technologies. Once these user needs and product requirements are identified, the specific functions to be addressed by the product are specified. The subsequent process of design of products and technologies to meet these functions is enabled by engineering tools such as three-dimensional modelling, physics-based simulations, and manufacturing of a minimum viable prototype. In these steps, un-biased decisions have to be taken using weighted decision matrices to cater to the design requirements. Finally, the minimum viable prototype is tested to demonstrate the principal functionalities. The results obtained from the testing process identify the potential future improvements in the next generations of the prototype that would subsequently inform the final design of product. This thesis adopted this methodology to initiate the design two product-prototypes: i) an image-recognition-integrated service (IRIS) robotic hand for children and ii) cascaded multi-core vapor chamber (CMVC) for improving performance of next-generation computing systems. Minimum viable product-prototypes were manufactured to demonstrate the principal functionalities, followed by clear identification of future potential improvements. Tests of the prosthetic hand indicate that the image-recognition based feedback can successfully drive the actuators to perform the intended grasping motions. Experimental testing with the multi-core vapor chamber demonstrates successful performance of the prototype, which offers notable reduction in temperatures relative to the existing benchmark solid copper spreader. </p>