The heat-transfer characteristics of 128 small-sized plate-fin heat sinks in a supercomputer chassis are investigated with CFD simulation. The V-shaped curves of the chip temperature versus fin pitch and fin thickness are derived and a thermal resistance model is built to explore the profile and obtain the convective heat-transfer coefficient of the heat sinks. It turns out that the V-shaped profile arises from the joint action of the thermal conduction and convection of heat sink, which can be attributed to the intricacy of the dependencies of thermal resistances on either fin pitch or thickness. It can be further concluded that Biot criterion is applicable to estimate the Biot number of large-scale plate-fin heat sink but not applicable for the small-sized one. The convective heat-transfer coefficient is a complicated function of fin pitch and fin thickness. The empirical formulas of heat transfer are obtained and the fin pitch and fin thickness are optimized.
