How to Attach Heat Pipes into an Assembly

ATS engineer Greg is in the lab today to discuss the ways to attach heat pipes to an assembly and the processes needed for each option.

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[docmdb]

So awesome this manufacturing dude is answering questions for all us pc modders! Youre the man!

[danielgiesbrecht]

This was a goldmine of information. I’m an electronics engineer and I’m looking to use a heat pipe for an industrial product, and this was a fantastic primer. Thank you!

[akikinnunen]

This video is absolute diamond. Thank you a lot for sharing the knowledge you have about heatpipes. I am planning on building a custom GPU cooler with heatpipes and huge heatsink. This video helped me a lot :)

[WarPigstheHun]

Hey I remember seeing you in an old, old video! Nervous but full of Smaht.

[powerhour]

Great explanation, sound, and video.

[chrisstanford]

Thanks for the prototyping insights, Wikipedia only goes so far🙂

[vladimirhadzic]

Maybe a weird question. But how would you shorten an existing heat-pipe? Can you for example crush it with a vise at a certain point that you preserve the vacuum inside the part you want, then cut the other part and solder the crushed end?

Thank you for your video.

[finalmanfinalman]

I've done a few custom at-home DIY heat pipe heatsink projects. Now in the past I've been using Sn42Bi58 low melt temp solder but have discovered recently that having silver part in the solder will improve it's strength. What solder paste would you recommend for heat pipe heatsink soldering?

[roadrash]

Do you think heat pipes could be 3d printed into complex shapes to achieve more efficient designs? So instead of the fins you'd have a mesh of heatpipes or something like that.

[douglascoggeshall]

2023-11-07 ... again, an absolutely excellent presentation ... well done ...

[infuriatedjurijcorn]

That is really interesting because i wanna create a custom heatsink for my laptop.
I´ve got 2 questions though:

Is there a point where the pipe will burst when you bend it and is there a diffrence in flat and round pipes?

Where can i check what my heatpipes are made of?
I mean i can obviously see that they are from copper but i mean whats on the inside if i would like to solder it.

[WarPigstheHun]

Question, say cost is not an issue, what if instead of 4 heat pipes, we had a component equivalent of 1 fat heat pipe?

Would the strip of cupper be more or less effective than the 4 heat pipe?

[passerby]

Great video thank you very much. Do you fill the heat pipes with plain water, distilled or other type liquid? What ratio is typically used for the liquid, e.g. 90% of available area inside each heat pipe? And random stupid question that just popped into my head - what would happen if liquid metal was used instead of water? I just googled that to see if anyone had tried and it seems not so stupid after all, apparently used in the space and atomic industries?

[Real_Tim_S]

I though up a couple of questions for a project I'm considering:
1) What if one wanted a special shape on one end of the heat pipe - say an equilateral triangle?
2) How does one calculate the thermal capacity of a heatpipe?
3) Say I have a 15Watt 1/2" heat source on one end, and want to keep the cold end within 5°C, and only have 2" of length embedded in a heatsink?

[paradiselost]

what IS the critical temperature?
for standard (i guess) 6 mm water type (i assume...)?

sort of wanna make a chimney water heater, solder some into a copper pipe and sleeve it in a larger pipe... sorta like an inside out hedgehog... bought a bunch of compression fitting with the idea its possibly better to do it that way. hard solder/braze the fittings in and just screw down onto the pipes. i may want to change them for longer ones. got 40mm shorties... shorter than i expected!

havent found much on heating the things for soldering...

then again, when i think about it...

theyre under vacuum. theyre going to have to get pretty hot before they get to a decent pressure, and copper is still good for pressure up til...400C-ish i would assume them to get some oxide colour change well before they explode!

[omegaglory]

I recently soaked a heat sink in a bath of isopropyl alcohol followed by warm soapy water. Some white residue has appeared around the seams and where the pipes meet the rest of the heat sink. Is this anything to worry about? I’ve been told it’s just solder flux but could also be thermal paste?

[PqzxnxfPxZHwDRV]

If I wanted to develop and build a video card cooler with you guys for a small batch of 1, 000 pieces, would that even make sense financially or be completely unsustainable? Something in the 400 W range with a vapour chamber, heatpipes and a CNC machined water-to-heatpipe heat exchanger? Skived fins on the topside of the vapour chamber and zipper fins on the heatipes? Similar to the new coolers on NVIDIA's FE cards for the 3000 series.

[spinning-rstudio]

Do you have any guidance in regard to how much solder paste needs to be used when reflowing the pipe into a machined channel? For example, is it sufficient to have solder mostly only running along the bottom of the channel or does it need to be 180 degrees around the channel?

[gf]

Some of the heatpipes in off the shelf coolers are slightly flattened at the cpu block base. I was wondering how does one flatten round heatpipes at one end properly?

[catklyst]

does the tin and bismuth not run the risk of alloying with the aluminium heat plate and cause problems?