Use of Heat Pipe Technology for Multi Media Thermal Management

Although automotive audio systems are getting increasingly sophisticated, cooling strategies are still primarily heat sink based.

This paper describes the integration of a heat pipe into automotive radios in order to manage the heat in an effective manner. The heat pipe system proposed in this paper enables the heat produced by the devices to move and dissipate at a location outside of radio casing.

The effectiveness of the system is validated experimentally by operating the radio with and without the heat pipe in a controlled environment and comparing the CD/media temperature in each case.

It was found that heat pipe can be very effective not only in reducing the heat sink temperature, but also the media temperature.