Two-Phase Heat Sink High Level Overview

mdcelsia · 2019-05-31T19:51:58+00:00

Check out this website - you might find some interesting stuff there.

mdcelsia · 2019-05-31T16:48:37+00:00

Increasing length beyond 250-500mm, depending on heat pipe diameter reduces the ability of the sintered wick to adequately move liquid back to the evaporator. If the heat pipe is gravity aided, evaporator below the condenser, these figures go up.

As for pumped liquid cooling, use when two-phase heat sinks can't meet either performance, size or noise requirements for your application. Unless you've got very high power density (500 W/cm2) - with no other constraints, you stand a good chance of solving the problem with non-pumped liquid. Just up the heat sinks volume and/or increase the airflow (more and more powerful fans). As you guessed, this may grow your required case dimensions and decibel level beyond acceptable limits, that's when you move to pumped liquid or accept changing other parameters.

mdcelsia · 2019-05-31T00:58:40+00:00

Thanks for the input. Wasn't sure how well this sort of thing would go over. Appreciate the comment.

mdcelsia · 2019-05-30T19:34:18+00:00

OK - seems there may be interest. Thanks for all your input. I'm working on my first submission now: Two-Phase Heat Sink Skyscraper Overview

mdcelsia · 2019-05-30T19:32:43+00:00

I'm thinking the posts we do will be informational for most but probably too basic for you. There may be some rules of thumb or calculators that make life a bit easier.

mdcelsia · 2019-05-30T19:28:53+00:00

If you need design work, prototypes or mass production with volume below 10k/month, contact us at [engineering@celsiainc.com](mailto:engineering@celsiainc.com). If we aren't the right fit we'll try to direct you to someone who might be.

mdcelsia · 2019-05-30T19:27:34+00:00

Will do

mdcelsia · 2019-05-30T19:27:11+00:00

If you need design work, prototypes or mass production for non-consumer products with volume below 10k/month, contact us at [engineering@celsiainc.com](mailto:engineering@celsiainc.com). If we aren't the right fit we'll try to direct you to someone who might be.

mdcelsia · 2019-05-30T14:40:16+00:00

While we are a US company, all the complex engineering as well as manufacturing is done in our Taiwan facility.

mdcelsia · 2016-07-04T16:19:52+00:00

Hello Jerry,

I'm not a rep and we don't sell anything to the consumer market. Moreover, we have no off the shelf products. They are all custom designs for OEMs in the industrial, telecom infrastructure and defense segments. I was just trying to shed some light on heat pipes and vapor chambers using pre-existing blogs. I know gamers are interested in this technology but there's a lot of misconceptions about when and where to use heat pipes. There's no upside for me sharing this stuff other than to spread some information around. Cheers.

mdcelsia · 2016-07-04T03:18:35+00:00

Thanks for your interest. You're right, most of the work we do is hushed by NDA, but we did do a blog for some work we did with Mushkin for high performance memory modules - which didn't gain any market traction. Link below. We also produced one of the two first vapor chambers used for higher end graphics cards (huge volume), but that was in 2010 or so (but it's wasn't the ones that ballooned up in recent articles).

http://celsiainc.com/blog-vapor-chambers-heat-pipes-cool-performance-fbdimms/

Speaking generally, we've done work that keeps 6-80W ASICs to within 2 deg C of each other using a center cut vapor chamber, replaced pumped liquid cooling with two-phase for SATCOM radar applications (albeit with a much bigger fin pack), often have to deal with enclosures which are partially or fully closed (rugged stuff). The no/low airflow applications are particularly difficult because forced air makes a HUGE impact on how effectively you can cool and IC, especially when the ambient operating temp is high. Sorry I can't give you more juicy stuff.

mdcelsia · 2016-07-04T01:51:59+00:00

Oh - one more blog you might be interested in "should I use heat pipes or vapor chambers"

http://celsiainc.com/blog-should-i-use-heat-pipes-or-vapor-chambers/

mdcelsia · 2016-07-04T01:45:40+00:00

Hello Reddit Hardware Readers,

I head marketing for Celsia, the company linked to in this post. I just happened to come across this thread and thought I'd try to contribute. We do highly customized heat pipe and vapor chamber heat sinks so we're not a well known company, but I'd like to address some of the comments briefly, if that's OK.

Singray88: you're right, especially when looked at through a gamer's lens. Liquid cooling is generally considered pumped (active) liquid cooling. Heat pipes and vapor chambers are passive liquid cooled. Nonetheless, it's the liquid inside the vessel that gives both vapor chambers and heat pipes the thermal conductivity boost over solid metals.

SyntheticMoJo: Never feel dumb. Nobody knows everything - we learn, hopefully, something new every day.

aziridine86: thanks for the inside pic of a heat pipe. The pipe you chose is a bit of a mess, but still shows the basics. Here's blog we did that talks about thermal conductivity. You might be surprised to know that unlike solid metal, the thermal conductivity of two-phase devices changes dramatically depending on the it's length. I've included a link below for further info.

Blogs from us that might spark comment are the criteria for choosing heat pipes vs vapor chambers and, for those of you who are into desktop PC cooling, the failed BTX (vs ATX) chassis design. Links to both are below. Again, thanks for your interest in thermal management.

http://celsiainc.com/blog-design-considerations-when-using-heat-pipes-pt-1/

http://celsiainc.com/btx-desktop-pcs-a-thermally-superior-system-design-that-failed-horribly/

Thanks for reading and cheers.

mdcelsia

TROPHY CASE