A Comprehensive Study on Heat Transfer in Electronic Cooling Systems

In electronic cooling applications, a TE cooler serves as a device for transporting heat away from a surface that has a temperature higher than the ambient temperature. Electronic devices such as PC processors generate a huge amount of heat during operation poses a great thermal management challenge because reliable operation temperature for electronic devices has to be maintained. In most cases, the maximum electronic device junction temperature needs to be held at less than 85°C for reliable operation. The maximum heat flow from a high-performance electronic package can be about 200 W and is still constantly increasing. Conventional passive cooling technologies using air or water as working fluid, such as the microchannel sink, cannot fully meet the heat dissipation requirement and active cooling methods should be applied. Due to the limited installation space in electronic packages, conventional bulk cooling systems are too big. TE coolers combined with air cooling or liquid cooling approach at the hot sideshow have great potential because of their small size, high reliability, and no noise.