A Novel Carbon Nano Tube based Wick Structure for Heat Pipes/Vapor Chambers

Unni Vadakkan1, Gregory M. Chrysler2, James Maveety2 and Murli Tirumala1

1
Corporate Technology Group, Intel Corporation
2
Technology and Manufacturing Group, Intel Corporation
E-mail: Unnikrishnan.vadakkanmaruveedu@intel.com, phone: 503-264-2721

heat pipe is shown in Figure 2. The four regions remain, but

Abstract
the sintered copper wick of Figure 1 is replaced with CNT
The paper introduces the novel concept of using Carbon
arrays.
Nano Tube (CNTs) based wick structures for high
performance heat pipes and vapor chambers. This ongoing
research aims to replace the copper wick structures with high
conductive CNT wick structures. Individual carbon
nanotubes possess extremely high thermal conductivities of
the order of 2000 - 3000 W/m-K. With such a material as the
wick in a heat pipe, the effective thermal conductivity of the
fluid saturated wick will be significantly higher that a copper-
based wick.
Keywords
Heat Pipe, Carbon Nano Tubes, Wick Structures, Vapor
Chamber, Electronics cooling, Two-Phase
Nomenclature
Figure 1: Cross-section of a sintered copper heat pipe
R thermal resistance (C/W) area, m2

Subscripts
adia adiabatic region
cond condenser section
eva evaporator region
1. Introduction
Heat pipes have been the workhorse for mobile
applications for the last seven years and it is considered as
one of the promising technology options to extend the limits
of air cooling. However current heat pipe technologies have
reached a performance limit and further optimizations of the
traditional copper heat pipe are returning little improvements.
The primary performance bottleneck stems from the use of
porous/grooved wick structures inside the heat pipe. The Figure 2: Cross-section of a heat pipe with CNT simulated
effective thermal conductivity of currently available copper wick
wick structures is limited to 20-40 W/m-K. This range of
values is nearly an order of magnitude too low for future In an effort to assess the feasibility of using a CNT array
mobile applications, and the wicking performance of current as the wick for heat pipes or vapor chambers, two very
wick structures is insufficient to address high heat fluxes important studies were carried out. The first was a detailed
without dry out. numerical study of the thermal properties of CNTs as a wick.
This study addresses the use of CNT arrays for wick The second study was to investigate the wetting
structures and their feasibility. The paper also describes the characteristics of CNTs.
new experimental set up using infrared imaging to
characterize the thermal properties of CNT wick structures. 2.1. Numerical study
However, there are challenges in CNT growth to ensure A detailed numerical study has been performed to
applicability to heat pipe wick structures. compare the thermal resistance of sintered copper heat pipes
with CNT heat pipes. The results of this study for water as
2. Feasibility study the fluid are summarized in Fig. 3 based on the modeling
The cross sectional view of a sintered copper heat pipe is methodology to predict the transient and steady state
shown in Figure 1. It can be seen from the figure that a behaviors by Vadakkan et al. [1]. These numerical findings
typical heat pipe has four main sections: the bottom wall, the suggest that CNT based heat pipes or vapor chambers can
wick, the vapor region, and top wall. A schematic of CNT
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reduce the evaporator resistance, the major bottleneck in
improving heat pipe performance, by more than 50%. In this
comparison Radia+Rcond = 0.05 C/W. In this analysis a wick
thermal conductivity of 200 W/m K is used for CNT wick
arrays
Figure 3: Comparison of heat pipe thermal resistance
2.2. Wetting experiments
To gage the potential for CNT as a wick material, simple
wetting experiments were conducted. There are previous
studies in the literature [2] on the wetting properties of carbon
nano tube arrays with polymerizing compounds. In this study
several fluids such as water, ethanol and Fluorinert liquid
FC72 were placed on CNT samples from Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and Purdue University, and the contact
angle was measured. The results for water show that it does
not wet CNT. Figure 4 is a micrograph of the water drop on
an array of CNT. No wetting was observed. However, the
tests with ethanol and FC-72 were much more promising.
Both of these fluids wet the CNT arrays. Figure 5 shows the
results of placing a drop of ethanol on the CNT array.
Substantial wetting of the array resulted. These clearly
indicate the possibility of CNT heat pipe with working fluids
such as ethanol and Fluorinert liquid FC72
Figure 4: Micrograph of water drop on an array of CNT
Vadakkan et al, A Novel Carbon Nano Tube based Wick ….
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Figure 5: Micrograph of ethanol drop on an array of CNT
3. Challenges
The application of CNTs for heat pipe and vapor chamber
wicks will depend on three fundamental considerations. The
on-going research is directed at addressing the following:
(1) Growth of vertically aligned carbon nano tube
microstructures 300 – 1000µm tall and of various
patterns on silicon and copper substrates?
(2) CNT density and patterns to maximize the effective
conductivity and fluid transport capability?
(3) Identification of the process parameters that
optimize both the thermal and wetting properties of
CNT arrays?
To address the first question, a research program as been
launched with RPI to investigate the growth of vertically
aligned CNT. RPI has demonstrated the feasibility of
growing very dense arrays of CNT up to 700µm tall on silicon
using chemical vapor deposition techniques. An SEM of a
sample is presented in Figure 6. The process which
successfully resulted in the tall growth used a liquid mixture
of xylene/ferrocene, evaporated and carried by Ar/H2 carrier
gas into the CVD furnace which is heated up to 770ºC.
Figure 6: SEM of 700 m tall CNT
4. Experimental set up for measuring the effective
thermal conductivity of CNTs
To the best of author’s knowledge, there are no established
measurement techniques to characterize the thermal properties
of CNT arrays. As part of the internal development of
measuring the effective thermal conductivity of CNT arrays
an IR based test fixture has been developed to measure the
23rd IEEE SEMI-THERM Symposium
effective thermal conductivity of CNT arrays. The apparatus
Conclusions
is shown in Figure 7. In this set up, the top CNT surface
Numerical and experimental analyses were carried out to
temperature is measured using an IR camera and the bottom
demonstrate the feasibility of carbon nano tube wick based
surface temperature is recorded with a calibrated
heat pipes. The wetting experiments showed that fluids such
thermocouple as shown in the schematic of Figure 8. A
as FC-72 and ethanol wet very well with CNTs. A detailed
uniform heat flux is applied using a cartridge heater at the
numerical study was conducted to compare the thermal
bottom side of a substrate on which CNT has been deposited.
performance of CNT heat pipes with standard sintered copper
The liquid level is maintained flush with the top of the CNT
wick structures. Experimental investigation points to the
array during the test.
viability of growth of dense CNT wicks and potential to tailor
fluid wick combination to realize the potential benefits. A
key gap is the quantification of thermal properties of the CNT
plus fluid combinations. Future work will address the
experimental characterization of the effective thermal
conductivity of CNT arrays.
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the work of the CNT
working group in tracking this project and RPI for growing
tall vertically aligned CNTs on silicon substrate.
References
1. U. Vadakkan, J. Y. Murthy and S. V. Garimella, “Transient
Analysis of Flat Heat Pipes,” ASME NHTC, HT2003-
47349, Las Vegas, Nevada, July 21-23, 2003
2. Chem. Mater., Vol. 17, No. 5, 2005, 977
Figure 7: Experimental apparatus for measuring the thermal 3. J. D. Halverson, “Wetting of Hydrophobic substrates by
conductivity of CNT water droplets containing surfactants: A classical molecular
dynamics study,” Chemical Engineering Department, City
With a known heat flow (from the cartridge heater) and a University of New York, 2004
known temperature difference (substrate and CNT tip) the
effective thermal conductivity of various CNT arrays and
potential fluids can be measured. There are no literature
sources available on the use of IR cameras for measuring the
temperature of carbon nano tubes. The potential risks of
these measurement techniques are the transparency of IR
beam arrays through CNTs and the liquid in the wick
structure, the small length of CNT arrays and the curvature of
the liquid in between individual CNTs. Wetting properties of
water with CNT arrays is an active research [3]. Changing the
topography of the CNTs is one of the methods to improve the
wetting the properties.
Top surface temperature
Using IR camera
Vapor flow

Liquid flow Liquid flow

CNT porous structure

substrate
Heat input
Tb surface temperature
Figure 8: Schematic details of test apparatus

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