Collins Aerospace

Collins Aerospace’ industry-leading thermal engineering and analysis resources are available to provide solutions to meet our customers’ thermal management needs. Our thermal engineering team combines years of experience with empirical data to ensure our products work the first time and every time. By combining mechanical engineering, aluminum brazing, and manufacturing process knowledge, we continually develop top-quality products.

Collins Aerospace’s thermal management engineering includes:

• Thermal & Delta P analysis
• Closed-loop cooling system analysis
• Structural analysis
• Brazed electronic box structure engineering
• 3-D mechanical modeling capabilities
• Tool and fixture engineering

Collins Aerospace is home to multiple CNC milling centers, giving us the capacity to handle high-volume production runs within the tightest of timelines. Along with this combined-capacity level comes the opportunity to share best-in-class manufacturing techniques, including:

• Lights-out machining
• Cellular manufacturing
• Reduced setup times

Our staff will work with your engineering team to determine feasibility of the most seemingly impossible tasks, and to help you realize any possible reduction in production costs. Our years of experience have shown that what may seem like insignificant changes often make huge differences in machining cycle time and can dramatically affect your end cost.

Collins Aerospace is experienced in all aspects of thermal management, and brazing is our specialty. As a leading thermal management company with best-in-class brazing technology, Collins Aerospace provides customers with single-source brazed assemblies, and can deliver “extra capacity” from one of our four brazing facilities when necessary.

A Brazing Primer
Joining metals at temperatures below 800º F is known as soldering, while brazing occurs at temperatures above 800º F. Brazing utilizes the inter-atomic attraction between two pieces of metal to form a bond that approaches parent metal strength. This is accomplished by “wetting” the metals to be joined with molten filler metal which, upon cooling, forms the joint. Welding differs from brazing in that the base metals to be joined are molten at the moment of joining, thereby limiting the ability to maintain very tight tolerances necessary for electronics thermal management applications.

Download our full Brazing Primer to learn more about the advantages of brazing.

Our rigorous testing:

• Nitrogen leak to 3,000 PSIG, hydrostatic to 10,000 PSIG
• Helium leak detection
• Flow and pressure drop
  • Air
  • Water
  • Ethylene glycol/water
  • Polyalphaolefin (PAO)
  • Coolanol
  • Hydro Fluorinated Ether (HFE)
• Pressure cycle testing
• Thermal verification testing
• Hardness testing
• Braze joint verification
• Metallurgical assessment

Certified special-quality processes include, but are not limited to:

• AWS C3.7 aluminum vacuum/dip brazing
• MIL-C-5541 chemical conversion coating
• SAE AMS-STD-2219 aluminum fusion welding
• AMS-H-6088 heat treatment of aluminum alloys
• MIL-STD-2219 aluminum fusion welding