Thermal performance of heat sink using nano-enhanced phase change material (NePCM) for cooling of electronic components

Solar photovoltaic panels can receive only eighty percent of total incident solar radiation. A small amount of incident energy is transformed into electrical energy based on the efficiency of the photovoltaic (PV) cell. The remaining energy leads to an increase in photovoltaic cell operating temperature which affects its life and power output. Cooling of PV panel is the best way to improve the efficiency either by passive or active cooling methods. PV cooling by Phase change materials (PCM) is the best effective technique. Paraffin wax is a non toxic material having high latent heat of fusion used for many thermal applications. In this study, paraffin wax is taken as phase change material in aluminum heat sink with fins. Using DSC, the melting point of paraffin wax is analysed. The flat plate heater is used instead of solar PV panel. Different wattages are used for the experiments. Different inclinations such as horizontal (00 ), vertical (900 ) and intermediate (450 ) were taken in to consideration. The melting starts at 50oC and complete melting occurs at a temperature around 60oC for the paraffin based heat sink. The heat sink surface temperatures, fin temperatures and PCM temperatures are measured. The transient temperature distribution of heat sink, PCM is analysed at different wattage inputs. The total thermal performance of this paraffin PCM based heat sink was analysed experimentally. This infers that the cooling of high temperature of PV panels can be done by using paraffin based PCM to increase the efficiency and life of the panels.

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Numerical Study of Cyclic Melting and Solidification of Nano Enhanced Phase Change Material Based Heat Sink in Thermal Management of Electronic Components

Volume 2: Micro/Nano-Thermal Manufacturing and Materials Processing; Boiling, Quenching and Condensation Heat Transfer on Engineered Surfaces; Computational Methods in Micro/Nanoscale Transport; Heat and Mass Transfer in Small Scale; Micro/Miniature Multi-Phase Devices; Biomedical Applications of Micro/Nanoscale Transport; Measurement Techniques and Thermophysical Properties in Micro/Nanoscale; Posters ◽

10.1115/mnhmt2016-6499 ◽

2016 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

S. K. Sahoo ◽

M. K. Das ◽

P. Rath

Keyword(s):

Phase Change ◽

Phase Change Material ◽

Thermal Management ◽

Forced Convection ◽

Heat Sink ◽

Volume Concentration ◽

Nano Particles ◽

Nano Particle ◽

Electronic Components ◽

Change Material

The Present investigation has been carried out to study the performance of nano enhanced phase change material (NEPCM) based heat sink for thermal management of electronic components. Enthalpy based finite volume method is used for the analysis of phase change process in NEPCM. To enhance the thermal conductivity of phase change material (PCM), copper oxide nano particles of volume fractions 1%, 2.5% and 5% are added to PCM. A heat flux of 2500 W/m2 is taken as input to the heat sink. The thermal performance of the heat sink with PCM is compared with NEPCM for each volume fraction of nano particle for both finned and unfinned configurations. It is observed that the nano particle volume concentration plays a major role in removing the heat from the chip in case of unfinned heat sink configuration. However, for finned heat sink configuration, the volume concentration effect is not appreciable. In addition, the performance of NEPCM based finned heat sink is studied under cyclic loading in both natural and forced convection boundary conditions. It is observed that under forced convection the solidification time is reduced.

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