Improvements in modern electronic devices with ever higher and more compact computing power create increasing amounts of waste heat in an ever decreasing volume. This heat must be dissipated for the continual safe operation of electronic devices. Today, this represents a tremendous thermal management challenge and heat pipes are an efficient heat management technology because they are entirely passive and capable of conducting large amounts of heat along their length and dissipating it to the environment via fins. The thermal conductivity of heat pipes is limited by the recirculation rate of the working fluid inside it. In this project, a new process was developed to create heat pipes using nanomaterials that allow for much improved liquids, which has the potential to revolutionise heat pipe performance.
We have found that we can increase the flow rate and therefore cooling rate of our heat pipes with a multiple fold improvement compared to commercial products. In addition the manufacturing process for the heat pipes developed in this project is cost effective and scalable. Finally, our process allows to manufacture heat pipes with new form factors and therefore address new heat management problems. Because of these promising results, we have decided to spin out a company that looks at commercialising the technology developed in this ERC Proof of Concept Grant.
