Thermal improvement of high speed processor cold plate used in military ruggedized mission computer

In military systems, as in the case in commercial products, abilities and missions thus the generated heat load of the electronic systems have been increasing day by day. In addition to this condition, devices that have smaller volume and low weight, ease structural design engineers to handle mechanical loads on systems. To design competitive products, these situations force thermal design engineers to find thermally effective, low weight, minimized volume, low cost, reliable solutions. In this study, under these restrictions; different methods to enhance the cooling capacity of conduction cooled cold plate used in a forced convection cooled military ruggedized mission computer are investigated via CFD analyses. The analyses are carried for extruded aluminium, copper, pyrolytic graphite embedded, and heat pipe embedded cold plates. The effects of change in slot morphology, the location of the pyrolytic graphite in aluminium cold plate are also investigated. The tests to validate performed analyses are conducted for aluminium and pyrolytic graphite embedded cold plates. The methods are compared in terms of thermal resistance, weight and cost parameters.