State of the Art of Electronics Cooling for Radar Antenna Applications

Abstract

High heat flux from electronic devices remains a continuing challenge for cooling of electronics hardware in radar antenna applications pertaining to the defense industry. Cooling methods for such applications have varied from conduction cooling approaches for the cooling of circuit card assemblies, to advanced convection cooling using two phase flow (with pumped refrigerant) for the high heat flux devices used in transmit / receive modules. It is found that the limiting parameter in such applications is usually the heat flux from the electronic device. This paper provides an overview of the cooling techniques used for defense electronics, as well as current modeling tools and analytical methods used for thermal design during the product development phase. The role of thermal interface materials used in the material stack up for the thermal design solutions will also be touched upon. Additionally, the importance of using experimental techniques to characterize the heat transfer coefficient for the pumped refrigerant two phase flow will be discussed.

Investigation of two-layer aluminum cold plate for high-power RF linear chip array cooling

“…A typical RF electronic liquid cooling architecture consists of a linear cold plate with circulating fluid, housing shells and a group chip array [4,5]. Chip array is usually soldered on the housing shell with high conductivity and low thermal expansion coefficient.…”

Comparison of Different Cooling Schemes for AlGaN/GaN High-Electron Mobility Transistors

“…In the lab, AlGaN/GaN HEMTs can generate power of more than 40 W/mm [ 5 ]. However, the actual power density is currently only 4–5 W/mm [ 6 , 7 ] due to the limitation in cooling capacity. Particularly, the hotspot generated by the accumulation of heat in the near-junction region leads to serious degradation, for example, in gain, output power, and power-added efficiency [ 8 , 9 ], limiting the performance of high-power output.…”