Experimental Investigation and Analysis of Optimum Design of Heat Sink

Abstract

This report presents the performance evaluation of heat sinks in the electronic cooling application done by using commercial software Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The three heat sinks analyzed were plate fin heat sink, plate pin-fin heat sink and plate pin-fin heat sink with cross cut. The simulations were performed to evaluate the thermo-hydraulic performance of heat sinks at various inlet air velocities of 6.5, 8.0, 10.0 and 12.2 m/s, heat of 10, 50 and 100 W and cross cuts of 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 mm. The results were measured in terms of the thermal resistance and pressure drop. The optimization was done to minimize the thermal resistance and pressure drop by using MINITAB software. Furthermore, the effect of shield height 5 and 10 mm in case of optimized design was investigated. Analysis of results has shown that, design has greater influence on both thermal resistance and pressure drop while heat has the negligible effect on thermal resistance. It was observed that as velocity increases thermal resistance decreases with the significant increase in the pressure drop. Thus, the choice of the plate pin-fin heat sink with cross cut of 1.5 mm on the basis of synthetical performance would be most appropriate for electronic cooling process. The heat shield with half of the fin height shows the considerable decrease in thermal resistance and pressure drop.