Heat sink including redundant fan sinks

摘要

A cooling device for electronic devices is built comprising at least two fan sinks thermally coupled together such that when one fan sink fails, the remaining fan sinks are able to compensate for the failed fan sink. Optionally, the remaining fan sinks may be controlled to speed up upon detection of a failure, increasing their cooling capacity to compensate for the failed fan sink. Also optionally, a thermal coupling device such as heat pipes may be used as part of the thermal coupling between the fan sinks to increase the cooling efficiency of the remaining fan sinks to the device or devices closest to the failed fan sink. Also optionally, the thermal coupling device may be configured to allow some flexibility in the cooling device assembly allowing for the cooling of non-coplanar electronic devices.