Air Cooled

Producing heat sinks from aluminum allows for significant weight savings and cost savings over copper, making aluminum extruded heat sinks one of the most cost-effective solutions for most electronic cooling applications.

Allowing for excellent heat transfer between the base and the fins, aluminum heat sinks are ideally suited for high volume productions. High-end custom extrusion designs can be used for more thermally challenging applications, while simpler straight-fin or cross-cut fin designs can be used for lower-powered ones.

Aluminum extrusion heat sinks can also be customized with a variety of options including:

• Embedded heat pipes
• Captive mounting hardware
• Color anodizing
• etc.

Applications are requiring increasingly higher power density, which often exceeds the cooling limits of conventional extruded aluminum heat sinks. This has driven the need for a heat sink that can meet the increased performance demand.

KTK’s bonded fin heat sinks dissipate more heat than extruded aluminum heat sinks of the same footprint because they allow for taller fin heights and tighter fin spacing. The higher fin densities and fin aspect ratios provide a greater surface area, which greatly improves thermal performance.

Separate fins are bonded to an aluminum base with KTK’s special epoxy that offers a high thermal conductivity, which outperforms other assembly techniques.

• Pure aluminum fins offer 15 percent better conductivity over extruded fins
• Customizable designs are available depending on need
• Allows for variable fin spacing
• Optimized thermal transfer from base to fins

In a system with a steady heat input, copper is superior to aluminum in keeping heat going in and out of the metal. Additionally, copper possesses better ease of solderability, and faces a lower amount of destruction from corrosion when compared to aluminum.

KTK’s unique soldering technique for bonding copper fins to a copper base plate is ideal for applications requiring the ability to dissipate heat from extremely high power on small volume heat sinks. Copper offers a greater thermal advantage over aluminum, as copper has higher heat conductivity.

KTK offers the following options:

• Customizable fin spacing
• Customizable height options
• Industry-standard finishing with bright dip and electroless nickel is available

Hybrid heat sinks combine the thermal benefits of copper with aluminum’s lightweight properties. For a larger enclosure, a hybrid design that uses copper for a localized heat sink joined to an aluminum frame with good thermal contact can significantly improve the cooling performance of a heat sink. The result is a superior cooling solution for a wide array of embedded applications. Joining copper to aluminum poses challenges that KTK is ready to meet.