Do You Know Why The Head Of The Liquid Cold Plate Uses Copper Instead Of Aluminum?

The liquid cold plate is made of copper material whether it is a CPU cold head or a graphics card cold head. As the commonly used aluminum material for heat dissipation, the thermal conductivity is also good, so why does the cold plate heat sink head not use aluminum as the cold head? As one of the leading liquid cold plate manufacturers, Winshare Thermal, let’s talk about the reason.

The cold head is attached to the chip, absorbing heat and transferring heat, and the material used must have a higher thermal conductivity. Having said that, let's briefly talk about what is thermal conductivity.

The thermal conductivity of the tube embedded cold plate manufacturer refers to a material with a thickness of 1m under stable heat transfer conditions, with a temperature difference of 1 degree (K, ℃) on both sides of the material, and transfer through an area of 1 square meter in 1 second (1s) The unit of heat is watts/meter·degree.

The popular understanding is how fast an object transfers heat. For example, holding a stone and putting it in hot water, the fingers can hardly feel the temperature change. When you touch the hot water with an iron rod, you can quickly feel the temperature change with your fingers. This is actually the reason for the different thermal conductivity.

In real life, materials with low thermal conductivity are used as insulation materials, such as asbestos, perlite, etc., because of their slow heat transfer characteristics. The heating of electronic chips needs to quickly dissipate the heat, which requires the use of materials with high thermal conductivity, and metal materials are definitely the first choice. The thermal conductivity of copper is 377, aluminum is 237, and silver is 412. Silver is too expensive to be used for cold heads, so copper is the best choice in comparison.

Then someone else said that there are aluminum cold radiators in water-cooled computers! In fact, this involves the problem of specific heat capacity. Specific heat is the heat required to increase the temperature of a unit mass of material by 1 degree, and copper is 0.39J/ kgK, aluminum is 0.9 J/kgK, then the heat emitted by copper is less than aluminum when reduced by 1 degree, that is, copper should dissipate heat faster than aluminum, so why use aluminum?

The original water channel welding of copper cold row requires tin, and the specific heat capacity of tin is very large, which restricts the heat dissipation rate of copper, and the density of aluminum is significantly lower than that of copper. The same type of cold row, aluminum row Lighter and thinner, more convenient to use. So strictly speaking, there is not much difference between copper and aluminum bars.