Products & Services

PCM Heatsinks
^{High Capacity Phase Change Heat Sinks}

ESLI PCM heat sinks are lightweight devices that can provide thermal inertia to dampen temperature changes caused by pulsed power systems or other periodic heat sources.

Concept

Phase change heat sinks are filled with a phase change material (PCM) and rely on its latent heat of melting for thermal storage. PCM materials such as paraffin are lightweight and have a high effective heat capacity over a small temperature range, but are poor thermal conductors. Consequently, traditional PCM heatsink enclosures must include numerous metal fins or channels to get heat in and out of the PCM material, resulting in heatsinks that are heavy, slow to react to heating, and sensitive to physical orientation or gravitational effects.

Innovation

ESLI has overcome these problems by using our unique high thermal conductivity fiber core materials to achieve fast and uniform melting of the PCM material in any orientation or in low gravity. As a result, ESLI's PCM heatsinks are compact, reliable and half the weight of traditional PCM heatsink designs. ESLI's paraffin based heatsinks can be designed to operate at or near 5, 18, 28, 37, 44, 55, or 61 °C. Non-paraffin based designs are also available for cryogenic or high temperature applications. ESLI's PCM composite heatsinks have been space flight tested on the Space Shuttle (STS-95) aboard the CRYOTSU experiment module, and will fly aboard NASA's Vegetation Canopy LIDAR experiment in 2000.

Applications

Transient thermal control for space batteries, LEO radiators, missile navigation modules, pulsed-power devices and re-entry thermal protection systems.

Contact
Timothy R. Knowles
Energy Science Laboratories, Inc.
(858) 552-2034