2011 - 20th Annual NC State Undergraduate Research Spring Symposium

This poster is a representation of weeks of work on a liquid cooling (thermal management) system to cool electronic devices. The system is a mechanical cooling pump that has no moving parts. It uses a fluid called ferrofluids as a working fluid. Ferrofluids are a fluid that has magnetic nano-particles synthesized into them. The fluid then in a magnetic field has magnet properties but when the field is removed the fluid keeps only its fluid properties.  Basic ferrofluids are easy to make, but for our experiment we need temperature sensitive nano-particles which are much more difficult to synthesize. How the pump works is that it uses the properties of the ferrofluid to control the flow of the fluid using a permanent magnet. The magnet causes the flow to move with the magnetic field then uses the heat flow to cause the fluid to reach the Curie point and become de-magnetized and continue to flow. The pump is a passive cooling system which means it needs no external energy besides the heat that it is cooling, to run.  This project is important because density of electronics packaging is constantly increasing. This project is set to replace the cooling systems for the solid state transformer that FREEDM is developing. It will cause much improvement because it will decrease the amount of energy  consumed.