[How to design an amplifier]

Our bottleneck with cooling was just the thermal interface material. Which may be more easily seen in our design since we have so much heatsink. At 25A per power supply MOSFET we were getting a delta of 40C between the MOSFET and the heatsink behind it with the best material we could find (berquist high flow 650P). With the Alumina we are at half that. We don't really have any hot spots, which I attribute to so much mass again. I don't know of a single mobile audio amplifier that has a 2" thick solid aluminum heatsink under the devices. So in our design the aluminum gradually and evenly heats up, the two fans in the back aren't blowing on anything. They are only to cause a pressure inside the amplifier so that air oozes out the gaps between the heatsinks and top cover. At a company I used to work for we would run 2 ohms full power sine for testing, it had to run at least 10 minutes like this to pass the test. In 10 minutes of that on this amp it is just getting warm enough to start turning the fans at the lowest speed. Our thermal design had to be this robust if it is to sit idle in Class A all day drawing 40A or more. That means that in Class A it is burning up over 500 Watts into pure heat into the heatsinks. We drove from Phoenix to Las Vegas like this, the amplifiers never got hotter than 140F.

True most amps build the mass into the finned top cover and have the solid heat sinks bars attached to the top cover, nothing as robust as a brick of solid metal. I'd like to see those heat chimneys in action, maybe throw a little smoke into the fans while the amp is stressing? I bet it would make for a good promo video. These amps are way overkill for my puny JL Audio twin 10W3v3's and Boston Pro 6.5's.

Have you considered doing small form factor 4 or 5 channel designs? I'm sure the complexity goes up exponentially in dealing with higher frequencies.

[How to design an amplifier]

This is pretty awesome seeing the amp go from thought to production. I used to work in the engineering and testing department for a company that produced telephony equipment so I have done my fair share of testing (and also repairing what the engineers break lol.) I also worked in vending/amusement repair so we got to play with a ton of high current MOSFETS/Transistors etc.

Have you thought about using: http://www.bergquistcompany.com/thermal_materials/hi_flow/hi-flow-300P.htm, It is phase change like you were using before but is made for high current applications. I bet the ceramic is a nice material but I have my doubts that on a microscopic level that it is maintaining complete contact with a porous material such as Al..

You need to get Magic Juan some magic tools!

Looks like he will need a solder fume extractor (solder fumes are not good to keep breathing in and need to be evacuated for employee health)

Get that man a hot air rework station and solder paste for SMD work! You will find his solder joints improve exponentially

He needs a tip cleaner/tip tinner too for the soldering iron and a new tip!

A raise lol.

Awesome work.

How much do one of your amps run for either home or car audio?

Thanks Boz. Yeah we tried several types of the high flow material, 300, 600 and 2000. It is good, but not as good as the ceramic. Yes the ceramic has to be used with a very thin layer of thermal grease for those microscopic imperfections.

Juan has all of those tools on his bench, anytime you see him using a burned up pos Hakko he is on my bench lol.

The home amp isn't for sale, this model of the car amp has a MSRP of $4199. This is introductory and could change. There are 3 more models to follow with the same design.

The home amp looks pretty awesome, the car amp is amazing too but I'm sure my car would lose a lot of acceleration and the amp would hate autocrossing lol.

I see you use Tenma stuff, been using it for years and the company that makes most of the Tenma equipment white labels it for other manufacturers. They are very competitive for the price. Xytronics also makes decent mid grade equipment.

Have you thought about a basic FLIR based camera system while stress testing to see all of the hot spots? You can rent/lease them from some suppliers which cuts down on the cost. For about $60 you can build a microcontroller based temperate station with something like a Raspberry pi and monitor about 10 temp ic's greased onto the heat sinks and transistors. Might give you a better idea as to the best way to cool 1,000,000 watts of power haha.

Do you think utilizing a quad array of high speed micro fans facing longitudially and all blowing into the same direction so you have an intake and exhaust would provide for better cooling across the MOSFETS? Some of the issue with high power MOSFETS is heat saturation so once you hit saturation it is that much harder to keep the temperature rise down.

[How to design an amplifier]

This is pretty awesome seeing the amp go from thought to production. I used to work in the engineering and testing department for a company that produced telephony equipment so I have done my fair share of testing (and also repairing what the engineers break lol.) I also worked in vending/amusement repair so we got to play with a ton of high current MOSFETS/Transistors etc.

Have you thought about using: http://www.bergquistcompany.com/thermal_materials/hi_flow/hi-flow-300P.htm, It is phase change like you were using before but is made for high current applications. I bet the ceramic is a nice material but I have my doubts that on a microscopic level that it is maintaining complete contact with a porous material such as Al..

You need to get Magic Juan some magic tools!

Looks like he will need a solder fume extractor (solder fumes are not good to keep breathing in and need to be evacuated for employee health)

Get that man a hot air rework station and solder paste for SMD work! You will find his solder joints improve exponentially

He needs a tip cleaner/tip tinner too for the soldering iron and a new tip!

A raise lol.

Awesome work.

How much do one of your amps run for either home or car audio?

http://damoreengineering.com/collections/audio-amplifiers/products/dual-mono-power-amplifier

Thanks, yeah I knew that it was more of a question for the original poster.

[How to design an amplifier]

This is pretty awesome seeing the amp go from thought to production. I used to work in the engineering and testing department for a company that produced telephony equipment so I have done my fair share of testing (and also repairing what the engineers break lol.) I also worked in vending/amusement repair so we got to play with a ton of high current MOSFETS/Transistors etc.

Have you thought about using: http://www.bergquistcompany.com/thermal_materials/hi_flow/hi-flow-300P.htm, It is phase change like you were using before but is made for high current applications. I bet the ceramic is a nice material but I have my doubts that on a microscopic level that it is maintaining complete contact with a porous material such as Al..

You need to get Magic Juan some magic tools!

Looks like he will need a solder fume extractor (solder fumes are not good to keep breathing in and need to be evacuated for employee health)

Get that man a hot air rework station and solder paste for SMD work! You will find his solder joints improve exponentially

He needs a tip cleaner/tip tinner too for the soldering iron and a new tip!

A raise lol.

Awesome work.

How much do one of your amps run for either home or car audio?