Process for making porous metal heat sink from clad aluminum wire

Abstract

A method of making porous metal heat sinks from aluminum is described. The sink, in its simplist form, is composed of layers of aluminum wire mesh randomly stacked and brazed together to form a rigid porous metal panel. Devices to be heated (or cooled) are mounted on the panel and forced air passed through the panel creating abundant heat transfer due to large surface area and favorable thermal conductivity of aluminum. Tortuous air passages through the wire mesh create conditions favorable for turbulence which further facilitates heat transfer. Advance in the state-of-the-art is the novel manufacturing method of making a low cost heat sink whose thermal performance is only slightly less than that of higher cost copper wire sinks. A secondary application of the invention is for the formation of metallic filtration material designed for filtering under controlled temperature conditions. Careful selection of wire size, weave, calendering, and layer orientation as well as the brazing process provide the necessary constituents for control of particulate size. The method is in contrast to that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,999,699 issued to John Chisholm (1976) in which layers of the laminate are fused together by more conventional techniques producing a higher performance and more expensive laminate.