Passive cooling assembly for flat panel displays with integrated high power components

Passive cooling of flat panel display designs with integrated high power components is investigated with the help of recently available semi-empirical and CFD based heat transfer correlations. A heat-spreader-heat-sink assembly is proposed for effective external natural convection cooling of the display panel. A flat vertical surface and plate finned heat sinks with various fin heights are considered as heat sinks in the assembly. Heat dissipation limits for both types of heat sinks are determined for various panel dimensions. It is shown that for large panels, it is feasible to use passive cooling even when integrated computer components are used in panels for demanding applications such as video games, high definition video processing and 2- D to 3-D conversion.

I. Introduction

Flat panel displays are improving very rapidly in terms of technology and functionality. Conventionally separate components such as game consoles, satellite receivers are being integrated into TV panels together with processing units (CPUs and GPUs) and data storage media.