The room temperature liquid metal cooling is quickly emerging as a powerful way for the thermal management in many advanced high heat flux devices, spanning from electronics, optoelectronics, battery, to power system etc. Except for its pretty high conductivity that a metal coolant could offer, the unique merit lying behind this new generation cooling strategy is its drivability of the highly conductive coolant through the electromagnetic effect where no moving elements are involved and thus only very few energy consumption is needed. In addition, even waste heat could be strong enough to generate applicable electricity for such flow driving purpose. More directly, the temperature gradient intrinsically generated between the heat source and the sink has also been managed to drive the flow of the coolant and realize an automatic practical enough cooling in some situations. All these practices lead to a totally noiseless pumping of the heat delivery and a compact and reliable cooling modular can thus be possible. Starting from this basic point, we are dedicated here to present an overview on the art and science in developing the technical strategies for a smart driving of the liquid metal cooling of the target devices. Designing philosophy for an innovated thermal management will be discussed. Particularly, electromagnetic pumping, waste thermoelectricity driving, thermosyphon flow effect, etc. will be comparatively evaluated with each of the working performances interpreted. Power consumption rate and efficiency will be quantitatively digested. Typical application examples in the cooling of a series of device areas will be illustrated. Further improvement on the cooling solution along this category will be suggested. Challenging issues in pushing the new technology into large scale utilization will be raised. It is expected that such silent self-driving of the liquid metal coolant will find unique and important values in a wide variety of thermal management areas where reliability, compactness, low noise and energy saving are urgently requested.

Volume Subject Area:
Thermal Management
Topics:
Heat flux, Liquid metals, Thermal management, Cooling, Coolants, Flow (Dynamics), Energy consumption, Heat, Batteries, Design, Electrical conductivity, Electronics, Metals, Noise (Sound), Optoelectronic devices, Power systems (Machinery), Reliability, Temperature, Temperature gradient, Thermal conductivity, Thermoelectricity, Waste heat
This content is only available via PDF.
Copyright © 2015 by ASME
You do not currently have access to this content.