Chennai: Researchers at IIT Madras have developed and experimentally validated a cooling configuration that could improve thermal management in compact electronic devices, including laptops, mobile phones, servers, data centres and defence electronics.The study introduces a novel design for a flat plate pulsating heat pipe (FPPHP), a passive cooling device that transfers heat using the back-and-forth movement of a working fluid through miniature channels. The researchers said the design addresses one of the major challenges facing modern electronics as devices become smaller and more powerful.Unlike conventional FPPHPs, where the heat-absorbing and heat-releasing sections are placed on the same side, the IIT team designed an ‘antiparallel’ arrangement with the evaporator and condenser on opposite faces of the plate, making it suitable for compact electronic housings.The researchers tested two sealing configurations — a silicon gasket and an O-ring. At a heat input of 100 W, the O-ring configuration reduced the evaporator temperature to about 69°C compared with around 75°C in the gasket-based design. It achieved an overall thermal resistance of 0.44 K/W, around 16% lower than the gasket configuration.The team found that aluminium outperformed copper in this design. The research, led by Prof Arvind Pattamatta and Prof Pallab Sinha Mahapatra from the department of mechanical engineering, IIT-M, was carried out in collaboration with researchers from IIT-M, Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, Chennai, and the Instruments Research & Development Establishment (IRDE), Dehradun, and was published in the peer-reviewed journal Experimental Heat Transfer.Explaining how the device works, Prof Arvind Pattamatta said, “Think of it like a small, sealed tube that contains a liquid which sloshes back and forth – when one end gets hot, the liquid evaporates, moves to the cooler end, condenses, and returns, creating a natural cooling cycle.”Davis T Vempany, research scholar at IIT Madras, said, “We noticed that while the gasket design holds more fluid initially, the O-ring version allows that fluid to pulsate much more freely. Think of it like blood circulation—better pulsation means better transport. That’s exactly what we’re achieving here.”Highlighting the commercial potential of the design, Prof Pallab Sinha Mahapatra, co-author of the study, said, “Aluminium is lighter and more practical for commercial FPPHP production. Finding that it also outperforms copper in our tests is a strong signal for commercial viability.”
