Improved Air Cooling Heat Pipe Based Thermal Solutions for Heat Sinks in Optical Plug Modules

Ever-increasing both data speed and traffic volume in the network telecommunications; as a result, producing more heat loss, challenges the conventional cooling methods. An optical plug module is a transceiver in data communication applications. By increasing the cooling demands, new thermal management solutions are necessary for optical plug modules. This article experimentally studies the heat pipe based cooling solutions for the optical plug modules. Heat pipes can passively transfer part of the produced heat from the hardly accessible places of the modules and expose it to the present active air cooling. Three different heat pipe based arrangements for a four-port optical plug assembly at both free and forced convection were investigated. Based on the results heat pipes helped to reduce heat sinks and total thermal resistance of this assembly on average by 27% and 16%, respectively under airflow rate of 10 ft³/min.