We are involved in a number of exciting projects concerning the development of thermal management devices, as well as thermal characterization through modeling and measurements. It is predicted that component level power dissipation rates in high performance electronic products will approach 100 W/cm² or more within the next decade. In response to this challenge, our research is focused on developing high performance, low cost, compact, and reliable schemes to handle these very large thermal loads.

In the area of thermal management techniques, we are developing special micromachined and microfabricated structures to enhance boiling heat transfer cooling schemes. We are also involved in the development and characterization of flat microfabricated "heat pipe"- like spreader plates.

In the area of thermal characterization, projects include assessment of the thermal performance of liquid cooled AlSiC Metal Matrix composite heat spreader base plates for power electronics thermal management, and modeling "on-chip" Phase Change Material (PCM) schemes for cooling high frequency microwave electronics. Please check out our projects page for further details.

Research Facilities

The researchers in our lab enjoy access to a wide array of state of the art experimental and computational facilities. The experimental facilities provide the ability for  thermal and flow characterization & visualization, microfabrication for thermal management applications, and high speed data acquisition. The computational facilities provide the ability to design layouts for MEMS structures for thermal characterization and to simulate three dimensional conjugate flow and heat transfer problems.

Thermal & Flow Characterization

IR camera (15 µm spatial resolution)

Particle image velocimetry system

Optical microscope

• High speed digital video camera (1000 frames/sec, 512 × 512 pixels)

• Hot wire/film anemometry

• Helium neon laser sheet for flow visualization

Programmable wafer dicing saw (Can dice 6 inch diameter wafers)

Manual wire bonder

• Data Acquisition Cluster

  • Agilent 34970A Data Acquisition Systems: 8 Units

• Computer Hardware

  • Sun Blade-2000 Unix workstations

  • Network access to Silicon Graphics I Origin at Georgia Tech high performance computer cluster.

  • PC cluster: 18 Pentium Based PCs

• Commercial Software

  • ANSYS

  • Fluent

  • Matlab

  • Labview

  • LEdit

  • Sun Forte 'Fortran' and 'C' Compilers

  • Tecplot

  • Pro-Engineer

  • Unigraphics NX2