High Conductivity (HiK™) heat sinks can also improve the Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP) compared to standard heat sinks. 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™ heat 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 has been proven in a variety of weight/volume-sensitive applications including: Ruggedized Electronics, UAVs, Handheld/Portable Devices, LEDs and optical devices.

Embedded heat pipes can improve performance and reduce the 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.