Chennai: Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras have developed and experimentally validated a new cooling configuration that could improve heat management in compact electronic devices such as laptops, smartphones, data centres, defence systems and electric vehicles.

The study introduces a novel flat plate pulsating heat pipe (FPPHP) design that addresses the growing challenge of dissipating heat generated by increasingly compact and high-performance electronic systems.

The research was led by Prof Arvind Pattamatta and Dr Pallab Sinha Mahapatra of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras, in collaboration with researchers from the institute, Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, Chennai, and the Instruments Research and Development Establishment (IRDE), Dehradun.

Unlike conventional FPPHP designs, where the heat-absorbing and heat-releasing sections are located on the same side of the plate, the IIT Madras team developed an "antiparallel" configuration that places them on opposite faces, making it suitable for space-constrained electronic systems.

The researchers evaluated two sealing configurations -- a silicon gasket and O-rings. Tests showed that the O-ring configuration delivered 16 per cent lower overall thermal resistance at higher heat loads than the gasket-based design. At a heat input of 100 watts, the O-ring configuration reduced the evaporator temperature to about 69 degrees Celsius, compared to about 75 degrees Celsius for the gasket-based system.

The team also found that aluminium outperformed copper in the new configuration, recording about 20 per cent lower thermal resistance while also reducing the overall weight of the cooling device.

Further experiments showed that making the inner channel walls superhydrophilic improved heat transfer and reduced thermal resistance by around 16 per cent compared to untreated surfaces.

According to the researchers, the technology has potential applications in consumer electronics, servers and data centres, defence and aerospace systems, and electric vehicles, where efficient thermal management is critical for performance and reliability.

The project received support from the Research and Innovation Center-DRDO at the IIT Madras Research Park. The findings have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Experimental Heat Transfer.