Mercury Announces Breakthroughs in Cooling Technologies for OpenVPX

“Our new thermal-management solutions are capable of dissipating tremendous amounts of thermal energy, while still meeting the same or smaller size, weight and power requirements for the overall solution,” said Darryl McKenney, Vice President of Mercury’s Engineering Services team. “By understanding the thermal profile for each specific component that makes up a system, we created innovations in the mass transfer of thermal energy that work at the individual component, module and subsystem level.”

According to Paul Monticciolo, Vice President and CTO of Mercury Systems, “These new cooling technologies offer tremendous benefits for our customers that are looking to take advantage of current and future high-performance, high-power sensor processing technologies. We feel this technology will be quickly adopted into a wide range of applications; it’s another example of Mercury innovation.”

Air-Cooled Solution

Mercury’s improved air-cooled integrated XMC thermal solution addresses the need for a standards-based approach to draw heat away from today’s high-powered mezzanine cards, then onto the carrier module and ultimately out of the system in air-cooled environments. By adding “hooks” that connect to a thermal bridge between the card and module, the solution typically reduces mezzanine card temperatures by more than 5 degrees Celsius. This results in a five-times improvement in MTBF, while remaining compliant with the VITA 48.1 mechanical specification for air cooling.

Conduction-Cooled Solution

The new conduction-cooled solution tackles the industry’s need for an effective way to remove heat from mezzanine cards, while staying within the ANSI/VITA 20 requirements for conduction-cooled PMCs. By leveraging flexibility built into the specification, Mercury’s advancement calls for the removal of the optional thermal ribs and the addition of a mezzanine cold plate that attaches to the carrier module. This creates a cooling area that is up to six times the area of the legacy solution. Once implemented, maximum power levels of the mezzanine site that can be cooled are increased from 15 watts per mezzanine site to an impressive 50 watts.

Air Flow-By

Mercury’s revolutionary Air Flow-By cooling techniques for VITA 48.7/48.1 circuit card assemblies reduce module weight by more than 20 percent, reduce the power of a typical system by greater than 5 percent, and improve the MTBF by five times. The AFB covers wrap around existing modules to create a sealed environment for protection against dust and contaminants, Level-2 Maintenance and EMI shielding (acts as an electrical Faraday cage). The specially designed enclosures draw heat from the internal components to the exterior surface, where air is flowed across both sides of the module for maximum cooling efficiency. Designed with today’s C-SWaP requirements in mind, AFB modules are offered in 1-inch pitch and attain industry-leading levels of thermal performance, providing over 200 watts per-slot of 6U cooling capacity — even when deployed in rugged environments. Uniquely versatile, AFB systems are capable of providing slots for conduction-cooled, while the AFB modules can be used side by side with air-cooled modules, thus easing the transition from legacy solutions.

All three innovations (air-cooled, conduction-cooled and AFB) are available today for high-powered radar, EO/IR, SIGINT and EW applications on rugged ground-based and airborne platforms.