Students Design Competition, Best Heat Sinks for Electronics Cooling

Author(s):  
Sadegh M. Sadeghipour ◽  
Mehdi Asheghi

The Thermal Fluids Engineering, a junior course required by the mechanical engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University, is offered in the spring semesters. The students who take this course have previous background in thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid mechanics. Therefore, the emphases of this course are mainly on the applications, including design of the thermal systems. Included in the course is a design project competition for which the students design and manufacture a heat sink for electronic cooling. The heat sinks are then tested and ranked according to their performance in cooling a mock processor. Students are usually very excited about this competition and work very hard and zealously to present the best design and, they sometimes come up with very novel ideas. The design project has proven to be of great pedagogical value to the students. In this paper we will report on the competition of the spring semester 2004, which has been between twenty-seven student groups. We will review the competition as a whole and discuss in more detail the projects that particularly performed the best and the worst. We will share our observations about the educational benefits of the design projects, as well.

Author(s):  
Margarita L. Cortez ◽  
Amir Jokar

The purpose of this undergraduate research project was to develop a test section and prototype heat sinks that will be used in an existing electronics cooling wind tunnel for a project in a future Advanced Thermal Systems course. During the course, students will design and manufacture their own prototype heat sinks. Heat sinks are made of highly conductive materials with various geometries and are attached to computer chips to dissipate heat from them to the surroundings. The prototype heat sinks will be manufactured in the school’s facilities which will limit the complexity of the geometry. The purpose is not to design a commercial heat sink. The students will experimentally analyze and simulate the heat transfer that takes place between a computer chip and a heat sink. During the course project the students will also analyze the heat sinks using CFD and compare the results to the experimental data. In this study, an electronics cooling wind tunnel was used to simulate the flow conditions that normally exist in a personal computer. A test section was designed and built in order to measure temperatures at different locations on a prototype heat sink using 18 type-T thermocouples. A data acquisition unit was set up and a Labview program was developed to collect the temperature data as well as the air velocity of the wind tunnel. The recorded data were then transferred to an excel file for further analysis. The objectives of this summer internship project were achieved through testing and analyzing different prototype heat sinks.


Author(s):  
Sadegh M. Sadeghipour ◽  
Mehdi Asheghi

Design is seen as the magic word and being a design engineer is considered to be the key to success in the job market by many of the mechanical engineering students. However, it is always assumed that the mechanical systems not the thermal engineers are indeed design engineers by education and practice. This notion probably stems from the fact that most of the thermal fluid courses in mechanical engineering curriculum seem to have been defined and developed to prepare undergraduate students for going to graduate school rather than the job market. The undergraduate courses usually emphasize on the theories with less attention to the design and application aspects. Perhaps, the responsibility of thermal engineering educators is to correct this notion by emphasizing more on the application and design in the existing courses or alternatively to develop and offer new courses on more applied topics. In this paper, we will report an integrated approach in teaching topics in fins and fin assemblies, which includes class lectures, laboratory experiments, ANSYS simulations and design competition. In this manuscript, we will report on the details of this approach including the procedures, methods, our observations, and the students’ feedbacks.


2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
R. S. Mullisen

A thermal engineering design project requiring the design, construction, and operation of a calorimeter that measures the specific heat of aluminum was assigned to a class of third-year mechanical engineering students. Before making the assignment, the author developed his own design, which consisted of two individual calorimeters — each an assembly of 13 aluminum plates with electric resistance heater wires laced between the plates. The exterior surfaces of both calorimeters and the surrounding insulation were identical. However, the interior plates were different — one calorimeter had solid interior plates and the other had perforated interior plates. By initially adjusting the electrical power into each calorimeter the temperature versus time curves for each calorimeter were matched. This curve match allowed cancellation of the unknown heat loss from each calorimeter and cancellation of the unknown heater thermal capacity. The final result was a specific heat for the aluminum alloy that deviated by 4.4% from a published value. A class of third-year mechanical engineering students, working in teams, produced designs using the method of mixtures (aluminum and water) and electrically heated aluminum samples. The 17 student groups plus the author produced 129 data points with a mean specific heat value that deviated by 19.5% from a published value.


Author(s):  
Janaka Ruwanpura

There is a lack of courses for design education in civil engineering curriculum except in fourth year at many Canadian Universities. An innovative approach introduced and implemented by the author to promote design education at the third year using a design competition at the University of Calgary was very successful. Student learned design concepts, applied them in the third year using a real project, integrated several civil engineering deliverables in one project without doing them in a separate course, and gained experience to get ready for their final year design course through this design competition. The eight courses included in the competition comprise all civil engineering aspects including structural, geotechnical, transportation, environmental, construction, material, and project management. The lessons learned by implementing the competition for 2 years, the author suggests a new idea to introduce a third year design project for civil engineering students. The paper discusses the purpose, structure, student participation, deliverables of the new idea.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
F.J.F. Martin ◽  
J.C.C. Rodriguez ◽  
J.C.A. Anton ◽  
J.C.V. Perez ◽  
C.B. Viejo ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Szabolcs Berezvai ◽  
Tibor Oláh ◽  
Zsófia Pálya ◽  
Bence Sipos ◽  
Brigitta Szilágyi

A műszaki- és gazdasági felsőoktatásban folyó kalkulusoktatás komoly kihívás elé állítja a tanárokat: viszonylag rövid idő alatt, nagy mennyiségű anyagot kell megtanítaniuk úgy, hogy a hallgató a matematika kurzusokon elsajátított ismereteket a szaktárgyakban, akár több félév csúszással is hasznosítani tudja. Olyan módszert kell kidolgozni, ami egy tudásában és képességeiben eltérő, nagy létszámú hallgatói közösségben is jól alkalmazható. A teszthatás, bár megfelel ezen követelményeknek, mégsem tartozik a gyakran alkalmazott metódusok közé. A módszer, amely a tanulás középpontjába az előhívást helyezi, sem a pedagógusok, sem a diákok között nem örvend nagy népszerűségnek. A teszthatás a többi tanulási-, tanítási metódushoz képest sokkal inkább gátat tud szabni a felejtésnek, de a hallgatónak ki kell mozdulnia a passzív befogadó szerepből, ami többeknek lehet kevésbé komfortos. Ezt a módszert találtuk alkalmasnak arra is, hogy a számonkérés előtti rövid időszakra koncentrálódó, úgynevezett kampányszerű tanulás helyett hallgatóinkat a folytonos tanulásra bírjuk. Ez azért volt fontos számunkra, mert bár rövid távon a megmérettetés előtti intenzív tanulás is eredményes, ennél a felejtés rendkívül gyors.A BME Gépészmérnöki Karának elsőéves mechatronikus és energetikus hallgatói számára az EduBase Online Oktatási Platform segítségével olyan könnyen kivitelezhető kalkulusoktatást valósítottunk meg, ami a teszthatás szempontjait szem előtt tartotta, kihasználta annak előnyös tulajdonságait. Jelen cikkben bemutatjuk a 2018/2019. tanév tavaszi szemeszterében, a Matematika G2 kurzuson végzett kutatásunk eredményeit. Hétről hétre, napi bontásban követjük a hallgatók tanulási aktivitását, vizsgáljuk a kampányszerű és a folytonos tanulással elért eredményeiket. Calculus education in engineering and economic higher education programmes poses a severe challenge for teachers: in a relatively short period of time, they have to teach a large amount of material so that the students can build on the acquired knowledge in further subjects even after several semesters. A method needs to be developed that can be applied well among large, heterogeneous students with different knowledge and skills. Test effect meets these requirements, although is not one of the most commonly used methods, since this approach that puts development at the centre of learning is not very popular among educators or students. The test effect can be a much more effective tool to reduce forgetting than other learning and teaching methods, but the student must move out of their passive, receptive role, which may be less comfortable for many. We also found this method to be suitable for continuous learning instead of so-called campaign-like learning, which focuses only on a short period before the examination. This was important to us since intensive learning before the exams is often effective in short term, but forgetting is also extremely rapid afterwards.For the first-year mechatronics and energy engineering students at BME Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, with the help of the EduBase Online Education Platform, we completed an easy-to-implement calculus course that took into account the aspects of the test effect and took advantage of its benefits. In this article, we present the results of our research in the spring semester of the academic year 2018/2019 in the Mathematics G2 course. From week to week, we followed the learning activity of the students on a daily basis, examining their results achieved through campaign-like and continuous learning.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fan Lau ◽  
Kathryn Hollar ◽  
Eric Constans ◽  
Kauser Jahan ◽  
Bernard Pietrucha ◽  
...  

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaewon Chung ◽  
Costas P. Grigoropoulos ◽  
Ralph Greif

Abstract As cooling requirements for electronic devices, e.g. computer processor units, power modules, etc. increase beyond the capabilities of air-cooling, interest has moved to several alternatives such as thermoelectric coolers, impinging jets and heat exchangers with phase change. Included among these, the capillary pumped loop is a very competitive cooling device, because of its performance reliability, no power requirements and low manufacturing cost. In this paper, a heat spreader employing capillary pumped loop principles was made of aluminum and copper and tested. The copper CPL heat spreader with heat sinks and fans on the condenser (86mm thick, 60mm wide, 181mm long) has demonstrated a cooling capacity of 640W at atmospheric pressure in the vertical orientation and maintains a difference between TIHE (temperature of the interface between heater and evaporator) and TAMB (ambient temperature) lower than 100°C.


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