Abstract: Thermoelectric technology is currently being used in many industrial applications for cooling, heating and generating electricity. This research mainly focuses on using thermoelectric to cool down high-speed computer chips at different operating conditions. A previously developed and validated three-dimensional model for optimizing and assessing the performance of cascaded thermoelectric and non-cascaded thermoelectric is used in this study to investigate the possibility of decreasing the hotspot temperature of computer chip. Additionally, a test assembly is built and tested at steady-state and transient conditions. The obtained optimum thermoelectric current at steady-state condition is used to conduct a number of pulsed tests (i.e. transient tests) with different shapes to cool the computer chips hotspots. The results of the steady-state tests showed that at hotspot heat rate of 15.58 W (5.97 W/cm2), using thermoelectric current of 4.5 A has resulted in decreasing the hotspot temperature at open circuit condition (89.3 °C) by 50.1 °C. Maximum and minimum hotspot temperatures have been affected by ON and OFF duration of the electrical current pulse. Maximum hotspot temperature was resulted by longer OFF pulse period. In addition, longer ON pulse period has generated the minimum hotspot temperature.
Abstract: Heat pipes are used to control the thermal problem for
electronic cooling. It is especially difficult to dissipate heat to a heat
sink in an environment in space compared to earth. For solving this
problem, in this study, the Poiseuille (Po) number, which is the main
measure of the performance of a heat pipe, is studied by CFD; then, the
heat pipe performance is verified with experimental results. A heat
pipe is then fabricated for a spatial environment, and an in-house code
is developed. Further, a heat pipe subsystem, which consists of a heat
pipe, MLI (Multi Layer Insulator), SSM (Second Surface Mirror), and
radiator, is tested and correlated with the TMM (Thermal
Mathematical Model) through a commercial code. The correlation
results satisfy the 3K requirement, and the generated thermal model is
verified for application to a spatial environment.