Product category:
Electrical and Electronic Subassemblies
News Release from: Elite Thermal Engineering | Subject: Thermoelectric cooling modules
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 26 September 2005
Cold plates reduce laser diode's
temperature
Elite Thermal Engineering recently released a series of high performance, high power thermoelectric cooling modules (cold plates) that are designed specifically for high power laser diodes.
Elite Thermal Engineering (ETE), a thermal management company that focuses on photonics cooling solutions, recently released a series of high performance, high power thermoelectric cooling modules (cold plates) that are designed specifically for high power laser diodes All the cold plates have mounting patterns for most of the diodes they are designed to cool, and custom patterns are available on request
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 18 Oct 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Conventional cooling modules consist of a cold plate and a heatsink with thermoelectric coolers (TEC) sandwiched in between.
As the power of laser diodes grows ever higher, people add more TECs between the cold plate and heatsink, and increase the size of heatsink to meet the 'heatsinking' demand.
But as the power and number of TECs increases, maintaining near perfect thermal interface becomes increasingly difficult, and spreading heat over a large heatsink becomes very costly.
Further reading
Kit isolates diodes
Elite Thermal Engineering offers standard diode isolation kit that includes one aluminum nitride plate and four nylon shoulder washers for mounting CS mount or equivalent diodes on cold plates.
Cold plates extend to OEM applications
Elite Thermal Engineering has extended its cold plate product line to OEM applications.
The efficacy of cooling modules decreases as the cooling demand increases.
The maximum cooling capacity of commercially available cooling module is stagnated at about 220W because of the deficiencies mentioned here.
To make matters worse there is the spreading resistance of the cold plate itself - the conventional cooling modules usually specify the cooling capacity based on uniform heat load to the cold plate.
But laser diodes have extremely concentrated heat load that is very sensitive to spreading resistance.
A laser diode that dissipates 50W of heat may need a 100W cold plate because of the heat-spreading resistance of the cold plate.
The engineering team at ETE developed the cooling modules using its proprietary DCS technology that enables scalable cooling modules that can offer much higher cooling capability.
The DCS technology also mitigated the heat-spreading problem of both the heatsink and cold plate.
The performance specification of ETE's cooling modules have accounted for the spreading resistance for laser diodes.
This technology is particularly crucial for cooling high-power laser diodes such as those found in material processing lasers, medical research and high power fibre lasers.
Most of the high power laser diodes need to be cooled by liquid because of the limitation of conventional cold plates.
Chillers used for liquid cooling are heavy, expensive and less reliable compared with solid-state cooling systems.
It is also very hard to develop compact laser systems with liquid cooling.
DCS technology offers solutions for either direct cooling laser diodes, with compact cold plates, or liquid cooling using ETE's discrete liquid cooling system, which is also based on solid-state cooling with DCS technology.
ETE is seeking strategic partnerships with major laser diode manufactures to provide turnkey laser solutions for customers.
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