| Abstract |
Today power electronics cooling is became a crucial problem. In order to dissipate large heat
flux densities, the use of materials with a high thermal conductivity seems to be very interesting.
Indeed they provide a good heat spreading and thus a decrease of the thermal resistance of the heat
sink. In this paper, we show why passive heat exchangers, called heat pipes, are able to replace these
materials. The interest of silicon etching techniques for heat pipe manufacturing is also demonstrated:
such heat pipes can be very compact, very light and have a better hydraulic behavior than metallic heat
pipes. A theoretical study shows that the effective thermal conductivity of a 2D grooved heat pipe can
be 800 W/m/K i.e. a value two times larger that that of copper. The last part deals with an
experimental study which shows that this heat pipe works very well in all orientations. |
