High Conductivity (HiK™) heat sinks can also improve the Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP) compared to standard heat sinks. It is well known that placing a discreet heat source on a large metal heat sink will produce large thermal gradients as the heat slowly conducts through the aluminum to the fins. Embedding heat pipes in a HiK™ sink can increase the thermal conductivity from around 180 W/m K to 500-1,200 W/m K, providing an opportunity to reduce heat sink plate thickness and fin area. This approach can be implemented in a variety of LED applications including large arrays, outdoor lighting, as well as some downlighting applications.
Figure 1. A HiK™ natural convection heat sink reduces the mass by over 34% when compared with an all-aluminum heat sink with the same thermal performance.
Embedded heat pipes can improve the performance and reduce that mass of forced and natural convection heat sinks. ACT fabricated a HiK™ heat sink and an all-aluminum heat sink with the same performance; see Figure 1. The total heat dissipation is 150W in both cases. The conventional aluminum heat sink is 12 inches (30.5 cm) long, weighs 9.6 lbs. (4.4 kg) and has a base thickness of 0.6 inch (1.5 cm). Introduction of 5 heat pipes, 3 in close proximity to the heat source and another two a little further out for improved spreading reduced the length to 10 inches (25.4 cm), reduced the thickness to 0.28 in (0.7 cm), and reduced the mass to 6.3 lbs. (2.9 kg) for an overall material reduction of over 34%.
Thermal images that demonstrate the improvement are shown in Figure 2. The Hi-K heat sink seen on the right maintains the same source temperature, even though the heat sink is shorter, lighter, and thinner. The improvement is directly attributable to the addition of heat pipes which can be seen as red lines in the picture on the right.
Figure 2. Thermal images of the two natural-convection heat sinks show that the HiK™ heat sink has similar performance to the standard heat sink, with a reduction in mass of over 34%.