A conduction cooled chassis offers the highest degree of reliability. At ACT, we work with our customers to find the best options to reduce conduction gradients and meet thermal, mechanical and environmental requirements.
Improve Your Chassis Performance
Many chassis are bare aluminum and if that meets your thermal requirements it is typically the best fit. The challenge is that aluminum has a relatively low thermal conductivity (167 W/m-K) and higher performing bulk metals have challenges such as cost or weight. Using passive, two-phase heat transfer enhancements such as HiK™ conduction cards, you can increase the bulk thermal conductivity of the chassis to > 1,000 W/m-K without sacrificing structural integrity. Embedded heat pipes have been used in many card guides, or full chassis to reduce temperature gradients from the card slot (heat input zone) to the ultimate heat sink (air-cooled fins or base attached, ultimate heat sink).
In many cases, embedded computing chassis designers are challenged with temperature and heat transfer coefficients either at the base or across the sidewall. With a localized zone of heat input where the card connects to the chassis, the challenge is often spreading heat along the sidewall surface. With 3-5x greater thermal conductivity, HiK™ chassis are an ideal solution.
Examples
- Curtiss Wright
- This large scale, naval system had a complete HiK™ back-plane and utilize natural convection cooling. The staggered heat pipe network isothermalized, creating high-fin efficiency over a typical electronic cabinet.
- Motorola
- Single board chassis design with natural convection requirement. ACT developed an integrated design and delivered turnkey parts that were developed to be highly ruggedize and provided thermal conductivity > 750 W/m-K
- Card Guides
- For an aircraft platform, these designs utilized 8mm heat pipes which provided significant capacity for a multi-platform design with varying power levels.
- DRS Chassis
- This design had liquid manifold on top of the assembly, but > 18” conduction paths to get heat to the liquid. ACT integrated heat pipes into the rails which added significant reliability over a liquid flow through design.
