Design and Thermal Analysis of a 3-D Printed Impingement Pin Fin Cold Plate for Heterogeneous Integration Application

Miniaturization high heat flux of power electronic devices have posed a colossal challenge for adequate thermal management. Conventional air-cooling solutions are inadequate for high-performance electronics. Liquid cooling is an alternative solution due to the higher specific heat and latent heat associated with the coolants. Liquid-cooled cold plates are typically manufactured by different approaches, such as skived, forged, extrusion, and electrical discharge machining. When researchers are facing challenges in creating complex geometries in small spaces, 3-D-printing can be a solution. In this article, a 3-D-printed cold plate was designed and characterized with water coolant. The printed metal fin structures were strong enough to undergo pressure from the fluid flow even at high flow rates and small fin structures. A copper block with the top surface area of 1 in $\times \,\,1$ in was used to mimic a computer chip. Experimental data have good match with a simulation model, which was built using commercial software 6SigmaET. Effects of geometry parameters and operating parameters were investigated. The fin diameter was varied from 0.3 to 0.5 mm and the fin height was maintained at 2 mm. A special manifold was designed to maximize the surface contact area between coolant and metal surface and therefore minimize thermal resistance. The flow rate was varied from 0.75 to 2 L/min and the coolant inlet temperature was varied from 25 °C to 48 °C. It was observed that for the coolant inlet temperature 25 °C and aluminum cold plate, the junction temperature was kept below 63.2 °C at an input power of 350 W and the pressure drop did not exceed 23 Kpa. Effects of metal materials used in 3-D-printing on the thermal performance of the cold plate were also studied in detail.