Thermal Management Solutions for Avionics (Summer, 2016)
Research conducted at GE Global Research, Niskayuna, NY
With the constantly increasing performance of various electronic equipment, novel and compact cooling solutions become an integral part of product development. I developed heat transfer and fluid flow models for liquid-cooled heat sinks for high heat flux avionics (> 16 kW per sq. m). In this project, I performed analyses on the hydrodynamic and heat transfer performance of the heat sink with internal flow features and validated the models with experimental data.
In another project, I helped develop a near-passive cooling system for laser diodes (> 500 kW per sq. m) used in aviation equipment. Our approach involved a combination of vapor chambers (as heat spreaders to effectively spread the heat from almost a point source of the diode surface to a larger surface of the heat sink), thermoelectric modules, and heat pipes. I developed a computational tool for the selection of appropriate thermoelectric modules for this application and fabricated an experiment to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.