From Silicon
to the Sea: Managing Heat Aboard Modern Ships
With a major grant from the Office of Naval Research, researchers at Rensselaer are collaborating with four other universities to address a hot topic in today’s military: how to keep modern ships cool in extreme environments.
Funded under the Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, the overall research aim will be to develop cooling techniques that can be used for thermal management of large-scale, distributed high-power electronic systems.
In today’s modern warfront, sailors and other military personnel are asked to operate more advanced electronics in hotter climates. Modern military ships, offices, and planes have thousands of computers, lights, and other electronics working at once, generating extremely high temperatures that require advanced cooling systems. Because of the increasing power levels of today’s electronics, and the need for these systems to operate at super-fast speeds in extreme environments, researchers need to find new cooling methods to lengthen the life of electronics and increase system performance, according to Michael Jensen, professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering and project manager for Rensselaer’s part of the project.
The researchers will work to develop thermal management techniques that reduce device temperatures below 50 degrees Celsius. Rensselaer will lead the research thrust examining the potential of using liquids to cool electronic systems. They will focus on interactions at the interface between hot electronic circuitry and a liquid, as well as determining how to integrate and manage the cooling of thousands of heat-generating sources distributed over a wide area. Rensselaer also will play a major role in designing a large-scale thermal system simulator to create models to permit researchers to model and control the cooling of a system over time, allowing the military to test cooling techniques prior to implementation.
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