Liquid Cooling for Next Generation Rugged COTS Modules

High power/performance electronic modules are challenging the ability of air cooling to successfully remove the generated heat. Single phase liquid cooling is a proven approach for effective cooling of large amounts of heat, and has been deployed on defense platforms. Determining the thermal performance of liquid cooled cold plates can be done with basic spreadsheet calculations. These calculations can be sufficiently accurate for first order thermal analyses of design options, which enables rapid trade-off studies. To demonstrate this, a sample spreadsheet is introduced and compared to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses, as well as empirical results.