Advantages of Vapor Chamber Heat Sink

Vapor Chamber Heatsink (VCH) are constructed from sealed copper plates and filled with a small amount of fluid such as de-ionized water that allows heat to be rapidly dispersed away from the source. Inside the chamber resides an internal support structure to prevent the buckling of chamber walls. The advantages of vapor chambers include that they are isothermal to 1-2°C, can be used to cool multiple components, can be made as thin as 3mm, and have low thermal resistance.

The effective thermal conductivity of vapor chambers is usually 5 to 100 times the conductivity of copper - but it is application specific. The thermal resistance of a VCH comes from many sources. The two major factors are the evaporation resistance and transport resistance. Transport resistance is distance dependent, but it is relatively small compared to the evaporation resistance. Since the dominating evaporation resistance is independent of size, the larger the VCH is compared to the heat source, the greater is the effective thermal conductivity. In a coarse calculation or CFD simulation, it is not uncommon that a uniform and isotropic thermal conductivity, say 10000 W/m-K which is 25 times the thermal conductivity of copper, is assigned to the entire volume of the vapor chamber.