Traditional thermal management techniques such as air-cooled plate- and pin-fin heat sinks are today being pushed to their limits by the increasing power densities of computing hardware (power supplies, controllers, processors, and integrated circuits). In comparison, direct immersion cooling within an alternative cooling medium such as commercial dielectric fluids offers the ability to handle high power densities while also accommodating tighter printed circuit board spacing. Together, these attributes are critical to facilitating higher computing densities. However, this type of high density setup also requires that any heat sink present be low profile so as to not obstruct adjacent printed circuit boards. Such a stringent limit on heat sink height can make achieving cooling targets challenging with existing designs.
In this work, the performance of several low profile (height less than 6 mm) heat sinks of varying design are evaluated within a carefully controlled direct immersion cooling environment. Commercial copper heat sinks fabricated through conventional manufacturing (CM) approaches serve as baselines for these performance tests. These same heat sink designs are also replicated via additive manufacturing (AM) utilizing a conductive, carbon-filled printable polylactic acid (PLA) composite material. The performance of these AM heat sinks are then compared to the CM heat sinks, with special emphasis on differences in thermal conductivity between the constituent materials. Finally, novel bio-inspired heat sink designs are developed which would be difficult or impossible to achieve using CM approaches. The most promising of these designs were then created using AM and their performance evaluated for comparison. The overall goal of this is to ascertain whether the design and fabrication flexibility offered by AM can facilitate low profile heat sink designs that can meet or exceed the performance of conventional heat sinks even with perceived deficiencies in material properties for AM parts.
Experiments were carried out within Novec 7100 dielectric fluid for single-phase natural convection scenarios as well as two-phase subcooled boiling conditions at atmospheric pressure. A custom test rig was constructed consisting of mirror-polished stainless steel plates and polycarbonate viewing ports to allow visual access. A rotating sample stage allows for data to be obtained at varying heat sink orientation angles from 0° to 90°. For two-phase experiments, multi-angle video capture allows for analysis of the two-phase dynamics occurring at the heat sink samples to be visualized and temporally linked to the associated temperature and heat flux data.
