Vice President – Product & Strategy Equispheres Inc
Electrification is driving higher power density and tighter packaging in automotive systems, making thermal management a primary constraint.
Building on an award-winning LPBF aluminum demonstrator, this talk focuses on how to generalize embedded passive two-phase cooling. Teams can apply the same approach when faced with a new “heat problem,” rather than treating it as a one-off part redesign.
We’ll review a transferable design/validation framework for integrating vapor-chamber heat spreading with liquid cooling. Selectively printing a functional porous wick concurrently with fully dense regions avoids lattice-heavy geometries while maintaining production-relevant build rates.
A proof point showed >60% reduction in pressure drop/pumping power and improved thermal uniformity (18°C lower peak temperature; 39°C reduction in temperature variation).
Learning Objectives:
Identify the key criteria that make a thermal problem a strong candidate for integrated passive two-phase cooling in LPBF aluminum.
Explain how porous wick regions can be printed concurrently with fully dense structures to enable functional vapor chambers suitable for production workflows.
Apply a validation approach using hydraulic and thermal performance measures to compare AM architectures against conventional baselines.
