Additively manufactured cold plates for GPUs
Monolithic copper and aluminium cold plates with geometry only metal 3D printing can make.
Why print a cold plate
A machined cold plate is a compromise between the geometry you want and the geometry a cutter can reach. Laser powder-bed fusion removes that compromise: fins can wave, channels can branch inside the part, a manifold and its fin bank can be one monolithic piece with no braze joint, and lattice structures such as triply periodic minimal surfaces become possible. The costs are surface roughness, feature-size floors around a few hundred micrometres, and the thermal conductivity of printable alloys, which is why copper printing matters.
The paper
My first-author chapter, submitted to Advances in Heat Transfer for a special issue on data center and electronics cooling and now in revision, reports the development of a monolithic copper cold plate with sinusoidal microchannels, printed with 3D Systems and tested for direct-to-chip cooling at GPU-class heat loads. It covers the design, the print, the CFD and the experiments, plus a sensitivity study on the thermal interface that the reviewers asked for.
Ongoing design families
- Wavy-fin split-flow and straight-flow plates in AlSi10Mg and copper with 3D Systems, simulated and tested on an NVIDIA RTX 5090 as a stand-in for any high-heat-flux GPU.
- Manifold microchannel and diamond pin-fin plates designed for printing, with IQ Evolution. The 50 × 40 mm foundation study showed manifold diamond pins beating manifold microchannels, untapered manifolds costing tens of kilopascals, and a copper alloy giving about 20 % lower resistance than aluminium.
- TPMS-lattice cold plates, first design iteration and variants, in simulation.
Status
Chapter in revision. Print-and-test cycles ongoing on the GPU test bench; results feed directly into the 10 kW manifold cold plate methodology.