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Publication Date

Fall 2020

Degree Type

Thesis - Campus Access Only

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical Engineering

Advisor

Farzan Kazemifar

Keywords

Electronic Cooling, Thermal Resistance, Thermal Spreading Resistance, Vapor Chamber

Subject Areas

Mechanical engineering

Abstract

Vapor chambers are heat spreading devices widely used in the electronic industry. This study optimizes a vapor chamber design for an electronic device size of 50 mm×50 mm by utilizing the advantage of numerical simulation and developing a simplified model to determine the most optimal vapor chamber design. The performance of the vapor chamber can be measured by its thermal resistance and thermal spreading resistance. These resistances can be varying with the following parameters: vapor chamber size, vapor space thickness, input power, and convective boundary conditions. A simplified conduction modeling technique is developed for efficient computation. The simplified model utilizes correlations from many existing studies to calculate the effective thermal conductivities of wick structure and vapor space. By using correlations and a simplified model, the computational effort is greatly reduced and provides reliable results. The results from the study show that the vapor chamber provides very small spreading resistance while the vapor chamber size and the vapor space thickness greatly influence the vapor chamber performance. Also, the operating limitations of the vapor chamber are investigated which shows that the boiling limit is the major restriction of the vapor chamber.

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