Cold Plate Design for Airborne Electronic Equipment

A solution to the problem of cooling certain types of high heat-dissipating airborne electronic equipment is the modification of the equipment chassis to incorporate a simple plate-fin heat exchanger, sometimes called a "cold plate." In this paper equations for cold plates are developed and the effect of variations in fin configuration on performance are discussed. Theoretical and experimental results based on tubes mounted on a cold plate are found to compare very favorably. The application of the cold-plate technique is illustrated for power transistors. This method of cooling is shown to be useful and efficient.