STTR Phase I: Innovative Two-Phase Cooling with Micro Closed Loop Pulsating Heat Pipes for High Power Density Electronics

Award ID: 2124797

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is the development of improved thermal cooling solutions for mobile devices. Cooling solutions today are often unable to meet the demands of 5G/6G telecommunications with thermal heating rates up to 10 times that of 4G technologies. Even current high performance 5G mobile phones have greatly increasing thermal loads, which, in turn, increase the external touch temperature of the smart phone and often trigger the phone to slow down its speed. The proposed technology may result in improved cooling for increased performance without limitations of performance throttling. Enhancing thermal cooling capabilities of cutting edge mobile devices may help enable widespread adoption of 5G/6G telecommunications, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, and big data applications. This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project develops a new passive micro-two-phase cooling based on pulsating heat pipes, which consist of a loop of microchannels in a flat plate in which oscillations of the coolant in the serpentine are generated by vapor bubbles to pump liquid and vapor to transport higher heat loads. The design harnesses complex self-induced pulsations to better perform the work of transferring larger quantities of heat by enhancing the pulsating heat pipe's fluid motion with localized obstructions to create distributed bubble nucleation points. The same obstructions will be used to improve the micro-thermal heat transfer processes. The project introduces microfluidics to pulsating heat pipes. The research objectives of the proposed project are to demonstrate substantial improvements in thermal performance compared to competing cooling technology (vapor chambers) at the same thin form factors. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Anna Brady-Estevez