HiK™ Card Guides Effectively Spread Heat for Liquid or Air Cooled Chassis
HiK™ Card guides provide improved thermal performance over traditional metal chassis assemblies. In sealed ruggedized electronics chassis, heat is dissipated from the boards to the chassis through a wedge-lock joint inside the chassis walls. This heat is conducted through the chassis walls and is dissipated to air or liquid-cooled heat sink.In many designs, such as non-uniform power in various slots or in bottom-mounted cold plates, conduction within the chassis walls is significant resistance in the overall system design. These issues can be easily overcome by integrating heat pipes into the aluminum structures.
For air-cooled systems, heat pipes isothermalize the card guide allowing higher fin efficiency for forced air or natural convection heat dissipation. ACT will work with customers for optimized fin geometry and heat pipe layout. In liquid-cooled systems, the coolant is typically located at the base of the chassis for reliability concerns. This can lead to large conduction gradients, making a HiK™ solution very effective. The heat pipes move heat directly to the liquid plate with minimal temperature rise. To avoid any redesigns, ACT offers this solution as an External Bolt-On HiK™ Plate in addition to an integrated card guide design.
The External Bolt-On HiK™ Plate can be attached to the current chassis to reduce temperature rise. The Figure below shows an example of the performance increase changing from aluminum to a bolt-on HiK™ plate.
Thermal Analysis comparing Aluminum and HiK™ Bolt-On Solution. Identical heat inputs and geometry were used in both simulations
In addition to the thermal performance enhancements, HiK™ solutions in card guides also offer significant weight-saving opportunities. In the analysis photo above, to achieve similar performance as the HiK™ solution with aluminum you would need to add nearly 2” of thickness and over 5 lbs of weight!
Contact ACT for more information on these solutions.