Articles from May 2005 Issue

"Revolutionary" New Thermal Management Materials

May 1st, 2005

Editors tend to frown on use of “revolutionary” in technical papers. However, advances in thermal management material properties in the last few years clearly warrant this word. There are now over a dozen materials with…read more

CFD Simulations in Electronic Systems: A Lot of Pitfalls and a Few Remedies

May 1st, 2005

Introduction In the past 15 years, we have observed a significant increase in the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes to calculate the thermal behavior of electronic systems. The benefits are undisputed when it…read more

Design of Experiments for Numerical Parameter Studies of Electronic Systems: Optimizing the Cooling Strategy of an Ethernet Switch

May 1st, 2005

Introduction As electronic products become more sophisticated and design margins tighten, defining the thermal management strategy early in the design cycle is vital to ensure a cost-effective design for the level of heat dissipation. Optimizing…read more

Phase Change Material Thermal Properties

May 1st, 2005

Table 1. General Solid-Liquid PCM Characteristics [1] When electronics are operated under transient conditions, increasing the thermal capacitance is a useful technique for limiting temperature increases and/or minimizing the performance requirements of a heat sink.…read more

Review of Low Profile Cold Plate Technology for High Density Servers

May 1st, 2005

Introduction Water cooling of computers was introduced more than twenty years ago, but had disappeared from the mainstream by the mid 1990s. The conversion of chip technology from bipolar to CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor)…read more

Threatened With a Pipe

May 1st, 2005

I have become a Heel Dragger. When natural convection was all the rage, I was touting fans. Once fan cooling became the status quo, I started dropping hints about heat pipes and thermoelectric coolers. The…read more

Using an Equivalent Heat Transfer Coefficient to Model Fins on a Fin

May 1st, 2005

Many readers of ElectronicsCooling are probably familiar with the use of fin efficiency formulas to estimate the thermal resistance of the commonly used parallel plate fin heat sink. Given the heat transfer coefficient, h, acting…read more