Thermal performance of an array condenser flat heat pipe for IGBT heat dissipation

With the development of the Insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) towards the directions of high power and high integration, the heat generation problems have been made increasingly prominent, for which the cooling requirements are increasingly demanding. Based on the analysis of various heat pipes for IGBT heat dissipation, in order for further improvement to the cooling effect of IGBT, structural optimization is performed in this paper for a sort of heat pipe radiator that is simple in structure, most widely used and comprised of traditional gravity heat pipes. A new-type of heat pipe, which combines the cold end of array with the hot end of public plane, is proposed. The effects exerted by filling rate, wind speed and heating power on its heat transfer performance and average temperature are studied experimentally. A comparison is performed of the heat transfer performance between the proposed heat pipe radiator and the traditional heat pipe radiator throughout the experiment. In this research, the novel heat pipe demonstrates obvious advantages in the cooling of IGBT. The conclusions drawn from the research are as follows. The optimum filling rate of heat pipe is 15%. The maximum equivalent thermal conductivity is 10,554.46 W/(m.k)(-1), which is 1.77 times that of traditional heat pipe radiator. The minimum thermal resistance is 0.34 degrees C/W, which is 58% of the traditional heat pipe radiator. With the same wind speed, the average temperature of heat source is 6.69-13.71 degrees C lower than that of traditional heat pipe radiator. The average temperature deviation of heat source ranges from 0.58-1.45 degrees C, which is 0.21-1.2 degrees C lower than that of traditional heat pipe radiator. Moreover, the advantage is even more noticeable when the power reaches beyond 30 W. The research has laid the foundation for the popularization and application of novel heat pipe radiators.