Design of Practical Liquid Metal Cooling Device for Heat Dissipation of High Performance CPUs

Broad societal needs have focused attention on technologies that can effectively dissipate huge amount of heat from high power density electronic devices. Liquid metal cooling, which has been proposed in recent years, is fast emerging as a novel and promising solution to meet the requirements of high heat flux optoelectronic devices. In this paper, a design and implementation of a practical liquid metal cooling device for heat dissipation of high performance CPUs was demonstrated. GaInSn alloy with the melting point around 10 degrees C was adopted as the coolant and a tower structure was implemented so that the lowest coolant amount was used. In order to better understand the design procedure and cooling capability, several crucial design principles and related fundamental theories were demonstrated and discussed. In the experimental study, two typical prototypes have been fabricated to evaluate the cooling performance of this liquid metal cooling device. The compared results with typical water cooling and commercially available heat pipes show that the present device could achieve excellent cooling capability. The thermal resistance could be as low as 0.13 degrees C/W, which is competitive with most of the latest advanced CPU cooling devices in the market. Although the cost (about 70 dollars) is still relatively high, it could be significantly reduced to less than 30 dollars with the optimization of flow channel. Considering its advantages of low thermal resistance, capability to cope with extremely high heat flux, stability, durability, and energy saving characteristic when compared with heat pipe and water cooling, this liquid metal cooling device is quite practical for future application. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4002012]