2025-2026 ASME K-16 / IEEE ITherm Cold Plate Student Design Competition

[ASME K-16]

Dear K-16 Community, 

We have finalized the competition guidelines for the 2025-26 ASME K-16 / IEEE ITherm Cold Plate Student Design Competition. Please find the guidelines and CAD files on our website: https://sites.google.com/site/k16asme/competition. Student teams should pre-register their interest in the competition using this form to receive updates about the competition.

Please share this information with undergraduate and graduate students that you know including your mentees, interns, and students in your classes. If your school has local ASME, IEEE, or IEEE EPS student group, please share this information with them! We posted to LinkedIn as well (Link to Post), and encourage you to share that post in your networks and/or comment on the post to improve visibility. 

Let me briefly summarize the competition here:

For this competition, students will design, analyze, and optimize an additively manufactured cold plate to cool a computer chip via forced convection liquid cooling. Student teams will first design their cold plates and analyze them with a computational tool. Then, they will write a short white paper analyzing their designs and documenting the design process (due Jan 12, 2026). 

New this year, ANSYS is offering free ANSYS licenses to student teams without the node restrictions and they will offer a tutorial in the near future tailored towards our competition guidelines. We hope this encourages participation from a wider variety of schools, including additional undergraduates who may not yet have the simulation skills. To request licenses, one student per team should request access using this form: https://ansysinc.formstack.com/forms/partner. More details on our website.

Student teams that have the highest predicted performance and most creative designs will have their designs by Fabric8Labs for experimental testing at the Purdue Applied Research Institute in the Spring. 

Based on the results, representatives from the best-performing teams will be invited to present their work at the IEEE ITherm conference in May, where a winner will be selected based on evaluation from a panel of experts.

Thanks!

Amy Marconnet

K-16 Chair