Performance Comparison of Liquid-Cooling with Air-Cooling Heat Exchangers Designed for Telecommunication Equipment

Abstract

Electronic and telecommunication industries are constantly striving towards miniaturization of electronic devices. Miniaturization of chips creates extra space on PCBs that can be populated with additional components, which decreases the heat transfer surface area and generates very high heat flux. Even though an air-cooling technology for telecommunication equipment has been developed in accordance with rapid growth in electrical industry, it is confronted with the limitation of cooling capacity due to the rapid increase of heat density. In this study, liquid-cooling heat exchangers were designed and tested by varying geometry and operating conditions. In addition, air-cooling heat exchangers were tested to provide performance data for the comparison with the liquid-cooling heat exchangers. The liquid-cooling heat exchangers had twelve rectangular channels with different flow paths of 1, 2, and 12. Silicon rubber heaters were used to control the heat load to the heat exchangers. Heat input ranged from 293 to 800W, and inlet temperatures of working fluid varied from 15 to 27℃. The heat transfer coefficients were strongly affected by flow conditions. All liquid-cooling heat exchangers showed higher cooling performance than the air-cooling heat exchanger. The heat exchanger with 2-paths could provide more controllability on the maximum temperature than the others.