New Heat-Sink Design Promises Cooler Lasers

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 18 -- Researchers at Ohio State University announced they have developed a heat sink for lasers and other microelectronic devices that is more efficient than current designs. The scientists reported that in simulations, a microelectronic circuit employing the new heat sink design heated up only about one-third as much as a circuit using a standard heat sink.
The OSU team, which was comprised of Kambiz Vafai, professor of mechanical engineering, and graduate student Lu Zhu, improved upon a conventional micro-channel heat sink design. This early design operated much like the coolant system in an automobile, circulating coolants such as water through a network of tiny tubes to absorb heat from electronics. Vafai and Zhu developed a two-layered micro-channel design that doubled the number of tubes, which measured only one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter. The results appeared recently in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer.