Enhancement of cooling performance of naval combat management system using heat pipe

•The heat-pipe-embedded heat sink was proposed for cooling electronic devices.•Steady thermal characteristics of the heat pipe were obtained from experiments.•The new heat sink showed remarkable improvement in reducing heat source temperature.•The new heat sink saves 14% space and 10% weight of each equipment. Electronic equipment employed in naval combat systems uses various types of printed circuit boards. Because high specification devices are used in such systems, the thermal density of the system is significantly increased. If the system cooling capacity is inadequate in the case of increased thermal loads, the system can malfunction or the system life cycle can decrease. In this study, a heat-pipe-embedded heat sink was newly proposed to improve the conduction heat transfer in heat sinks, and it was directly attached to the heat source mounted on the printed circuit board module. First, an experiment was conducted to measure the thermal resistance of the unit heat pipe. Next, the optimal embedding angle of the heat pipe was determined through experimental and numerical studies using a manufactured prototype of the heat-pipe-embedded heat sink. Finally, computational fluid dynamic analyses of the printed circuit board module adopting the heat-pipe-embedded heat sink were conducted. The proposed method reduced the maximum temperature of the heat source by more than 15 °C compared with the original bear heat sink. Additionally, the unit electronic equipment used in the combat management system facilitated 14% space saving, 10% weight reduction, 1% cost saving, and 1% energy saving.