Abstract
A numerical study is conducted on thermal performance of a large-area hot plate specially designed as a heating and cooling tool for thermal nanoimprint lithography process. The hot plate has a dimension of $240mm{\times}240mm{\times}20mm$, in which a series of cartridge heaters and cooling holes are installed. The material is stainless steel selected for enduring the high molding pressure. A numerical model based on the ANSYS Fluent is employed to predict the thermal behavior of the hot plate both in heating and cooling phases. The PID thermal control of the device is modeled by adding user defined functions. The results of numerical computation demonstrate that the use of cartridge heaters provides sufficient heat-up performance and the active liquid cooling in the cooling holes provides the required cool-down performance. However, a crucial technical issue is raised that the proposed design poses a large temperature non-uniformity in the steady heating phase and in the transient cooling phase. As a remedy, a new hot plate in which heat pipes are installed in the cooling holes is considered. The numerical results show that the installation of heat pipes could enhance the temperature uniformity both in the heating and cooling phases.