Chinese Scientists Lead the Development of a New Heat Pipe Manufacturing Technology

Researchers from the team of Professor Song Hongwu at the Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently joined with domestic and international collaborators to develop a new heat pipe manufacturing technology based on electrochemical deposition additive manufacturing. This achievement addresses a key challenge in cooling highperformance chips and has, for the first time internationally, realized the insitu formation of a gradient porous copper wick inside an Ωshaped grooved heat pipe. As the computing power of chips such as GPUs and TPUs continues to increase, power consumption and heat flux density keep rising, and traditional cooling solutions are gradually approaching their performance limits. By placing an Ωshaped copper tube in a copper salt solution, the research team used electrochemical deposition to “grow” the porous structure layer by layer, while precisely controlling the current and time so that the pore size changes continuously from the nanoscale to the microscale, thereby forming a gradient wick that is more conducive to liquid return. The study shows that the capillary suction of this new structure is about twice that of traditional sintered copper powder structures, and after assembly, the cooling capacity of a single tube is about 1 times higher than that of a traditional straightgroove tube. This process can also reduce secondary assembly and lower interfacial thermal resistance, providing new cooling materials and manufacturing ideas for hightemperature, highheatflux scenarios.