Thermal Performance of Two and Three Dimensional Radial Flow Heat Sinks

Author(s):  
Ronan Grimes ◽  
Kieran Hanly ◽  
Edmond Walsh

Space and power constraints in many contemporary electronic systems place a greater importance than ever on efficient thermal management solutions. This paper investigates the performance and optimisation of air cooled heat sinks suitable for deployment in compact electronic devices. The heat sinks examined have circular footprint, with air flowing from the centre, radially outwards through radially aligned channels. Heat sink height is examined through experiments which were performed on heat sinks with high and low fins, with two and three dimensional flow and heat transfer phenomena respectively. In both cases the effect of angular fin spacing is investigated to determine optimum fin spacing for a range of heat sink pressure drops. Heat transfer correlations from literature which were originally developed for parallel finned heat sinks are compared with the experimental data. The main findings of the paper are that the performance of the high profile two dimensional heat sink is more sensitive to fin angular displacement than low profile three dimensional heat sinks. The parallel fin correlations from literature were found to predict the performance of the three dimensional heat sinks more accurately than the two dimensional heat sinks.

2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Egan ◽  
P. A. Walsh ◽  
E. Walsh ◽  
R. Grimes

Reliable and efficient cooling solutions for portable electronic devices are now at the forefront of research due to consumer demand for manufacturers to downscale existing technologies. To achieve this, the power consumed has to be dissipated over smaller areas resulting in elevated heat fluxes. With regard to cooling such devices, the most popular choice is to integrate a fan driven heat sink, which for portable electronic devices must have a low profile. This paper presents an experimental investigation into such low profile cooling solutions, which incorporate one of the smallest commercially available fans in series with two different heat sink designs. The first of these is the conventionally used finned heat sink design, which was specifically optimized and custom manufactured in the current study to complement the driving fan. While the second design proposed is a novel “finless” type heat sink suitable for use in low profile applications. Together the driving fan and heat sinks combined were constrained to have a total footprint area of 465 mm2 and a profile height of only 5 mm, making them ideal for use in portable electronics. The objective was to evaluate the performance of the proposed finless heat sink design against a conventional finned heat sink, and this was achieved by means of thermal resistance and overall heat transfer coefficient measurements. It was found that the proposed finless design proved to be the superior cooling solution when operating at low fan speeds, while at the maximum fan speed tested of 8000 rpm both provided similar performance. Particle image velocimetry measurements were used to detail the flow structures within each heat sink and highlighted methods, which could further optimize their performance. Also, these measurements along with corresponding global volume flow rate measurements were used to elucidate the enhanced heat transfer characteristics observed for the finless design. Overall, it is shown that the proposed finless type heat sink can provide superior performance compared with conventional finned designs when used in low profile applications. In addition a number of secondary benefits associated with such a design are highlighted including lower cost, lower mass, lower acoustics, and reduced fouling issues.


Author(s):  
Oraib Al-Ketan ◽  
Mohamed Ali ◽  
Mohamad Khalil ◽  
Reza Rowshan ◽  
Kamran A. Khan ◽  
...  

Abstract The drive for small and compact electronic components with higher processing capabilities is limited by their ability to dissipate the associated heat generated during operations, and hence, more advanced heat sink designs are required. Recently, the emergence of additive manufacturing techniques facilitated the fabrication of complex structures and overcame the limitation of traditional techniques such as milling, drilling, and casting. Therefore, complex heat sink designs are now easily realizable. In this study, we propose a design procedure for mathematically realizable architected heat sinks and investigate their performance using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. The proposed heat sinks are mathematically designed with topologies based on triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMSs). Three-dimensional CFD models are developed using the starccm+ platform for uniform heat sinks and topologically graded heat sinks to study the heat transfer performance in forced convection domains. The overall heat transfer coefficient, surface temperature, and pressure drop versus the input heat sources as well as the Reynolds number are used to evaluate the heat sink performance. Moreover, temperature contours and velocity streamlines were examined to analyze the fluid flow behavior within the heat sinks. Results showed that the tortuosity and channel complexity of the Diamond solid-networks heat sink result in a 32% increase in convective heat transfer coefficient compared with the Gyroid solid-network heat sink which has the comparable surface area under the examined flow conditions. This increase is at the expense of increased pressure drops which increases by the same percentage. In addition, it was found that expanding channel size along flow direction using the porosity grading approach results in significant pressure drop (27.6%), while the corresponding drop in convective heat transfer is less significant (15.7%). These results show the importance of employing functional grading in the design of heat sinks. Also, the manufacturability of the proposed designs was assessed using computerized tomography (CT) scan and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging performed on metallic samples fabricated using powder bed fusion techniques. A visible number of internal manufacturing defects can affect the performance of the proposed heat sinks.


Author(s):  
L. T. Yeh ◽  
Joseph Yeh ◽  
B. T. F. Chung

A CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis is performed on the finned heat sinks. For convenience, a commercial CFD code, Flotherm, is utilized in the analysis. Though the code can handle the radiation heat transfer, the present analysis is limited to the natural convection with the base of the heat sink at a constant temperature. The continuous fin configuration is first considered due to the importance of its applications. Several experimental data are available for the vertically straight-fin heat sink and a useful correlation is also developed. For given overall fin dimensions of 15″ × 10.341″ × 2.2″, the correlations are first employed to determine the optimal fin spacing. This optimal fin spacing of 0.439 in is then used to develop the baseline CFD model. The dimensions of the baseline CFD model are as follows: Fin width (in): 10.341. Heat sink length (in): 15. Fin spacing (in): 0.439. Fin height (in): 2.0. Fin thickness (in): 0.1. Fin base plate thickness (in): 0.2. Fin numbers: 20. The baseline model with various fin spacing is analyzed and the results (heat loss from the finned heat sink) compare well with those obtained through the correlations. The analysis is extended to the staggered and in-line fin configurations because of their practical applications. Three different fin lengths, including 1″, 3″ and 5″ fin length for the staggered fin array are examined. The results indicate that the effectiveness of heat transfer is increased as the fin length increasing. The continuous fin configuration is the most efficient, and is followed by the staggered fins and then by the in-line fins.


Author(s):  
Tzer-Ming Jeng ◽  
Meng-Ping Wang ◽  
Ying-Huei Hung

In the present study, the forced air convection heat transfer for unconfined and confined heat sinks by considering flow bypass effect is studied on a semi-empirical basis. The flow bypass effect for unconfined heat sinks is firstly investigated. For unconfined heat sinks with specified fin spacing and fin height, the results reveal that the value of Ui/(ε·Us), which represents the flow bypass capability, increases from a very small Reynolds number up to a certain Reynolds number, say Rei = 60–200; and then gradually decrease with further increasing Reynolds number. At a specified Reynolds number, the Ui/(ε·Us) will generally increase when the fin spacing decreases or the fin height increases. For heat sinks partially confined in a channel, a novel concept to estimate an imaginative flow domain, in which the flow is influenced due to the existence of heat sink in the channel, is postulated in the study. Accordingly, an effective method for predicting the flow velocity between fins, flow rate through the heat sink and the fin heat transfer coefficient in both unconfined flow and confined flow is presented. Finally, in order to explore the optimal number of fins, a performance parameter defined as the ratio of thermal conductance to the required pumping power is introduced; an optimal procedure to determine the maximum performance parameter for a heat sink partially confined in a channel is postulated. The results manifest that the optimal number of fins increases with increasing inlet flow velocity.


1991 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. L. Lehmann ◽  
J. Pembroke

Forced convection air cooling of an array of low profile, card-mounted components has been investigated. A simulated array is attached to one wall of a low aspect ratio duct. This is the second half of a two-part study. In this second part the presence of a longitudinally finned heat sink is considered. The heat sink is a thermally passive “flow disturbance”. Laboratory measurements of the heat transfer rates downstream of the heat sink are reported and compared with the measured values which occur when no heat sinks are present. Data are presented for three heat sink geometries subject to variations in channel spacing and flow rate. In the flow range considered laminar, transitional and turbulent heat transfer behavior has been observed. The presence of a heat sink appears to “trip” the start of transition at lower Reynolds numbers than when no heat sinks are present. A Reynolds number based on component length provides a good correlation of the heat transfer behavior due to variations in flow rate and channel spacing. Heat transfer is most strongly effected by flow rate and position relative to the heat sink. Depending on the flow regime (laminar or turbulent) both relative enhancement and reductions in the component Nusselt number have been observed. The impact of introducing a heat sink is greatest for flow rates corresponding to transitional behavior.


Author(s):  
M. L.-J. Levac ◽  
H. M. Soliman ◽  
S. J. Ormiston

Micro-channel heat sinks are currently at the forefront of cooling technologies for computer chips where the input heat flux is projected to exceed 100 W/cm2 [1, 2]. The quest for better heat-sink designs has produced different ideas, one of which is the idea of using multi-layered micro-channel heat sinks [3, 4]. The objectives of the present investigation were to conduct a detailed numerical study of the hydrodynamic and thermal behavior of a two-layered micro-channel heat sink and to compare the performance of the two-layered heat sink with that of a single-layered sink under laminar flow conditions.


Author(s):  
Yan Fan ◽  
Poh Seng Lee ◽  
Li-Wen Jin ◽  
Beng Wah Chua ◽  
Na-Si Mou ◽  
...  

A novel cylindrical oblique fin minichannel heat sink was proposed to cool cylindrical heat sources using forced convection scheme. In this paper, parametric numerical study was employed to understand the importance of the various dimensions of the oblique fin heat sinks and their heat transfer performance and pressure drop. Three dimensional conjugated heat transfer simulations were carried out using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method based on laminar flow to determine its performance in the oblique fin heat sink. 214 parametric studies were performed by varying the oblique angle from 20° to 45°, secondary channel gap from 1mm to 5mm and Reynolds number from 200 to 900. Their thermal performance was compared for a constant heat flux of 1 W/cm2. The results show that the flow is main channel directed in shorter secondary channel structure while the flow becomes secondary channel directed in longer secondary channel structure. Secondary flow becomes more effective in heat transfer when increasing the secondary channel gap. When the oblique angle increases, more flow will be diverted into secondary channel and improve flow mixing to enhance the heat transfer. The best configuration in this paper was suggested based on the numerical data point. The overall performance can be improved up to 110% at Reynolds number of 900 compared with conventional straight fin minichannel. Therefore, this is the attractive candidate for future cylindrical heat sinks.


Author(s):  
Ali C. Kheirabadi ◽  
Dominic Groulx

This study compares two common numerical strategies for modeling flow and heat transfer through mini- and micro-channel heat sinks: the unit cell approach and a complete three dimensional unified approach. Conjugate heat transfer and laminar flow through a copper-water heat sink over a 2×2 cm2 heat source have been modelled using the finite element method within COMSOL Multiphysics 5.0; with the primary objective being to identify the channel width at which the two models yield similar temperature and pressure predictions. Parametric studies that varied channel widths showed that as these widths were reduced, and the total number of channels increased, temperature and pressure predictions from both models converged to similar values. Relative differences as low as 5.4 and 1.6 % were attained at a channel width of 0.25 mm for maximum wall temperatures and channel pressure drops, respectively. Based upon its computational efficiency and conservative over prediction of wall temperatures, the unit cell approach is recommended as a superior design tool for parametric design studies at channel widths of less than 0.5 mm.


Author(s):  
Jason Stafford ◽  
Ed Walsh ◽  
Vanessa Egan ◽  
Pat Walsh ◽  
Yuri S. Muzychka

This paper discusses the importance of developing cooling solutions for low profile devices. This is addressed with an experimental and theoretical study on forced convection cooling solution designs that could be implemented into such devices. Conventional finned and corresponding finless designs of equal exterior dimensions are considered for three different heat sink profiles ranging from 1mm to 4mm profile in combination with a commercially available radial blower. The results show that forced convection heat transfer rates can be enhanced by up to 55% using finless designs at low profiles with relatively small footprint areas. The advantages of both finned and finless geometries are presented along with the limitations of the customary finned heat sink design at low profile scales. The results also show large increases in heat transfer rates over that predicted which can be attained at the low profile scale based on geometry selection. Dimensionless comparisons are made between experimental results and combined hydrodynamic and thermally developing duct flow theory which is representative of the flow regime within both the finned and finless geometries. Overall, this paper provides optimization and geometry selection criteria which are relevant to designers of low profile cooling solutions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (7) ◽  
pp. 44-49
Author(s):  
Rajshekhar V Unni ◽  
Vijay S Majali

In the paper review of studies of heat sinks under natural convection is taken up. The discussions are mainly on experimental works carried out on rectangular fin arrays, optimization of heat sink dimensions and heat transfer enhancement. The geometries of heat sinks, fin spacing, fin height, fin length, fin thickness and fin material and base to ambient temperature difference are the important parameters on which heat transfer rate depends. So the design and optimization of the heat sink geometries becomes essential. It was found that the optimum fin  spacing is ranging from 6.1- 11.9mm which gives maximum heat dissipation; the base to ambient temperature difference is 20-1500C. During most of the experimental work carried out a good thermal conductivity material which is cost-effective was chosen.


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