To design, manufacture and test a Mini Hybrid Capillary Pump Loop, which is composed of more than one mini capillary evaporators and a loop heat pipe (LHP) which is used as the capillary pump. The application of such a device would be for direct cooling of components within electronic boxes. Compact and thin evaporators are located near high dissipating components inside the enclosure, the LHP is located outside the electronic box and the condenser is directly bolted to the panel heat pipe network. This provides an efficient method of extracting the internal waste heat.

There is a fundamental issue in the electronic box design that the power density is increasing. In addition, system integrators prefers the dry thermal interface since it allows the unit to be dismountable. However, the thermal interface has a conductive limit where the only method of increasing the heat transfer would be to increase the surface area as well as the contact pressure and reducing the interface filler thickness. These thermal interface requirements impact the foot print of the electronic, the bolting method, the interface flatness as well as the component operating temperature. Therefore, there is the need of extracting the waste heat from units without increasing the volume or mass of the units. There are on-going activities using Loop Heat Pipes (LHP) to transport waste heat from electronic components within an electronic boxes to the unit's base plate. However, this application is limited by the foot print of the electronic unit. Furthermore, the LHP has the disadvantage of having the liquid reservoir attached to the evaporator, which needs to be a certain size depending on the length of the LHP's fluid lines. This creates accommodation issues and limitation due the available volume within the electronic box. In addition, the LHP requires to be in close proximity of the dissipating component and it is limited when multiple dissipating components need to be cooled.The mini hybrid capillary pump loop with multiple thin capillary evaporators would cool multiple dissipating components on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). The LHP, located outside of the electronic box, would act as a pump providing the fluid circulation and the fluid inventory for the evaporators. The fluid reservoir or compensation chamber size can freely vary based on the unit's cooling requirements The condenser, with the advantage of being thin and low mass, could cover a larger surface area onto the panel heat pipe network. This new technology would allow to develop higher power density electronic boxes without the restrictions or limitations of the thermal contact conductance while maintaining the components within the allowable temperature limits and keeping the overall mass low.The activity aims to design and develop an engineering model of such a scheme.