By Josh Perry, Editor
[email protected]

Advanced Thermal Solutions, Inc. (ATS), a leading-edge thermal engineering company based in Norwood, Mass., recently described two customized wind tunnels that it fabricated for solid-state drive (SSD) manufacturers that needed to do thermal characterization.

ATS designed wind tunnels for companies looking to characterize solid-state drives in the PCIe form factor, as show above. (Wikimedia Commons)

In both cases, the SSD were in PCIe form-factor, but the two wind tunnels and the two processes that the manufacturers used to obtain the data were different.

The first SSD company bought an open-loop wind tunnel from ATS, which can be operated either vertically or horizontally. In this instance, the wind tunnel was used horizontally, and the customer built a cart to bolt the wind tunnel on, before pushing the whole cart into an environmental chamber where temperatures could be increased to test levels.

Test ports were included in the wind tunnel’s test chamber to enable the manufacturer to power up the SSD, which was laid flat inside the wind tunnel.

The second customer bought a closed-loop wind tunnel to test its SSD vertically. A customized chamber was built underneath the test section to enable to customer to connect the cards to an external motherboard. The slots could also be closed to test standard components or heat sinks.

“One of the customers also requested a custom, rugged sensor to avoid damage through multiple uses,” the article said. “ATS was able to adapt one of its handheld surface probes, a stainless-steel probe with a pointed tip for exact positioning of the sensor on the desired spot, by reducing the length and designing a custom port that would hold the sensor in place.”

As the article explained, SSD have gained traction in the market and that requires increased testing to determine the products’ limits and set manufacturer parameters.

“This means that thermal characterization of SSD and thermal management systems deployed to dissipate the heat of these drives are going to be of increasing importance in the coming years,” the article continued. “Using research-quality wind tunnels gives manufacturers a leg up in determining how their drives will perform in different real-world environments and makes the process of SSD characterization easier for users.”

Read the full article at https://www.qats.com/cms/2019/02/01/ats-wind-tunnels-designed-for-ssd-and-pcie-thermal-characterization.