Parametric Study of Heat Sink Performance at High Altitudes With Air Impingement Cooling

Author(s):  
Robert E. Seidel ◽  
Jinny Rhee

Heat sinks are one of the primary mechanisms today for thermal management of electronics. In the high altitudes reached by modern military aircraft, the capacity for air cooling is reduced due to the rarefied atmosphere. With an increase in altitude there is a subsequent decrease in the density of air. A review of the literature shows a lack of research done on pin-fin heat sinks with impingement flows at low Reynolds number conditions. Experimental testing will determine the thermal resistance of a pin-fin heat sink with impingement flow at low absolute pressures. A test apparatus will be constructed, and experiments will be conducted within a hypobaric chamber. In a hypobaric chamber, it is possible to simulate altitudes up to 30 000 meters by reducing the absolute pressure using a vacuum pump. Temperature is regulated and air is circulated within the chamber. The test apparatus, which is to be completely enclosed within the hypobaric chamber, consists of a centrifugal blower forcing air through a duct. Air is impinged upon a pin-fin heat sink heated with uniform flux on the base. Incident air flow is along the axis of each circular pin-fin, and exhaust from the heat sink will be transverse to the pins. Feedthroughs are available in the chamber wall for supplying electrical power to the blower, for taking temperature measurements with embedded thermocouples, and for measuring blower shaft speed. Temperature measurements are made in the base of the heat sink, in the air, and at other points to characterize other heat losses from the apparatus. Blower speed is monitored with an optical tachometer, and by similarity laws for turbomachinery it will be possible to determine the air flow impinging upon the heat sink. Pressure in the chamber will be varied in several steps up to the equivalent of a 30 000-meter altitude, and at each step a correlation will be made between heat sink thermal resistance and Reynolds number of the impinging air.

Author(s):  
T. J. John ◽  
B. Mathew ◽  
H. Hegab

In this paper the authors are studying the effect of introducing S-shaped pin-fin structures in a micro pin-fin heat sink to enhance the overall thermal performance of the heat sinks. For the purpose of evaluating the overall thermal performance of the heat sink a figure of merit (FOM) term comprising both thermal resistance and pumping power is introduced in this paper. An optimization study of the overall performance based on the pitch distance of the pin-fin structures both in the axial and the transverse direction, and based on the curvature at the ends of S-shape fins is also carried out in this paper. The value of the Reynolds number of liquid flow at the entrance of the heat sink is kept constant for the optimization purpose and the study is carried out over a range of Reynolds number from 50 to 500. All the optimization processes are carried out using computational fluid dynamics software CoventorWARE™. The models generated for the study consists of two sections, the substrate (silicon) and the fluid (water at 278K). The pin fins are 150 micrometers tall and the total structure is 500 micrometer thick and a uniform heat flux of 500KW is applied to the base of the model. The non dimensional thermal resistance and nondimensional pumping power calculated from the results is used in determining the FOM term. The study proved the superiority of the S-shaped pin-fin heat sinks over the conventional pin-fin heat sinks in terms of both FOM and flow distribution. S-shaped pin-fins with pointed tips provided the best performance compared to pin-fins with straight and circular tips.


Author(s):  
Seo Young Kim ◽  
Ralph L. Webb

The thermal performance of plate fin, round pin-fin and offset strip-fin heat sinks with a duct-flow type fan arrangement was analytically evaluated. Heat sinks of 65mm × 60mm plan area × 50 mm height with a 4300-RPM DC fan (60mm × 15mm) were chosen for the performance comparison. A constant temperature, 6 mm thick heat sink base plate is assumed so that thermal spreading resistance is not involved. The operating point on the fan curve is based on the flow pressure drop impedance curve through a heat sink using the friction factor correlation for the chosen heat sink. The loss coefficients at both the entrance and the exit of heat sink are included in the flow impedance curve. The operating point is defined by the balance point of the flow impedance curve and the fan performance curve. After determining the operating air velocity, the convective thermal resistance of heat sinks is evaluated from the Nusselt number correlation for the chosen heat sink. Results obtained show that optimized round pin-fin heat sinks provide 32.8%-to-46.4% higher convective thermal resistance compared to an optimized plate-fin heat sink. The optimized offset strip-fin heat sink shows a slightly lower convective thermal resistance than the plate-fin heat sink. As the offset strip length decreases, however, thermal performance seriously deteriorates.


Author(s):  
T. J. John ◽  
B. Mathew ◽  
H. Hegab

This study numerically investigates the feasibility and advantages of using a multilayer pin-fin heat sink to increase the overall performance of the heat sink. For the purpose of determining overall performance of the pin-fin heat sink a figure of merit (FOM) term is introduced in this paper, which constituted of both the thermal resistance and the pumping power of the heat sink. Higher the FOM of a heat sink better is its overall performance. A computational fluid dynamics software CoventorWARE™ is used for the analysis of micro heat sink performance. A small portion of the entire heat sink is modeled in this study assuming repeatability towards both sides for the ease of analysis. The developed models consist of two sections, the substrate (silicon) and the fluid (water at 278K). A uniform heat flux is applied to the base of the heat sink. A single layer micro pin-fin heat sinks with same dimensions as of the multi layer heat sink was also modeled for the comparison purpose. Temperature distribution at five different locations from the inlet to the outlet section is also analyzed to study the temperature distribution over the heat sink. Circular pin-fins were used in both the multilayer and single layer micro heat sinks. Feasibility of using micro channels as the second layer was also investigated in this paper and it proved to have advantages over using pin-fin structures on both layers. A geometric optimization based on the substrate thickness of the second layer of the double layer heat sink showed that the substrate thickness of the second layer doesn’t have any effect on the overall thermal resistance of the heat sink.


Author(s):  
Jose-Luis Gonzalez-Hernandez ◽  
Abel Hernandez-Guerrero ◽  
Carlos Rubio-Jimenez ◽  
Cuauhtemoc Rubio-Arana

In this work the performance of pin-fin heat sinks having an unconventional fin profile is compared with the use of cylindrical fins. The fin profile is a sinusoidal function and a staggered array is considered. The overall thermal resistance and total pressure drop are reported for the pin-fin heat sinks. The effect of using a wave function for the fin is studied for different number of complete waves along the height of the fins and a geometric parameter defined as the ratio of the higher to the lower radius of the fins is proposed. The study is carried out for two different inlet velocities, and for two different fin densities, corresponding to 5×5 and 7×7 arrays. An entropy generation analysis for each pin fin heat sink configuration is carried out and reported. The results of the present analysis reveal that the proposed geometry has an improvement as compared to the conventional heat sinks profiles when there is a high number of waves per fin. The effect of the geometric parameters defined in this study for the thermal and hydraulic performance is identified and discussed as well.


Author(s):  
Mario Urdaneta ◽  
Alfonso Ortega

The thermal resistance of in-line square-pin fin heat sinks was experimentally investigated. In a companion paper [1], extensive results for the hydraulic behavior of such heat sinks with and without top-bypass were reported. It was shown that the top-bypass, as well as pin pitch, strongly influence the fin flow available for cooling. Systematic measurements of the overall thermal resistance with a uniformly heated base were performed for the same set of twenty aluminum heat sinks. Pin height was varied from 12.5 mm to 22.5 mm, pin pitch was varied from 3.4 mm to 6.33 mm, and base dimensions were kept fixed at 25 × 25 mm. The overall base to ambient thermal resistance was measured as a function of heat sink geometry, approach velocity and by-pass height. Experimental results were compared with predictions based on a simple one-dimensional “two-branch bypass model”. It was found that the overall heat transfer is governed by the fin flow, hence, empirical data for the zero bypass case can be used to predict the decrease of heat sink performance with flow bypass.


Author(s):  
Yin Lam ◽  
Nicole Okamoto ◽  
Younes Shabany ◽  
Sang-Joon John Lee

Heat removal is an increasing engineering challenge for higher-density packaging of circuit components. Microchannel heat sinks with liquid cooling have been investigated to take advantage of high surface-to-volume ratio and higher heat capacity of liquids relative to gases. This study experimentally investigated heat removal by liquid cooling through shallow copperclad cavities with staggered pin-fin arrays. Cavities with pin-fins were fabricated by chemical etching of a copperclad layer (nominally 105 μm thick) on a printed-circuit substrate (FR-4). The overall etched cavity was 30 mm wide, 40 mm long, and 0.1 mm deep. The pins were 1.1 mm in diameter and were distributed in a staggered arrangement. The cavity was sealed with a second copperclad substrate using an elastomer gasket. This assembly was then connected to a syringe pump delivery system. Deionized water was used as the working fluid, with volumetric flow rate up to 1.5 mL/min. The heat sink was subjected to a uniform heat flux of 5 W on the underside. Performance of the heat sink was evaluated in terms of pressure drop and the convection thermal resistance. Pressure drop across the heat sinks was less than 10 kPa, dominated by wall surface area rather than the small surface area contributed by cylindrical pins. At low flow rate, caloric thermal resistance dominated the overall thermal resistance of the heat sink. When compared to a microchannel without pins, the pin-fin microchannel reduced convective thermal resistance of the heat sink by approximately a factor of 4.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (6 Part A) ◽  
pp. 4181-4187
Author(s):  
Yichi Zhang ◽  
Shinichi Saito ◽  
Yoshishige Tsuchiya ◽  
Yeliang Wang

A surface-modified scalable heat sink that can be fabricated by applying silicon microfabrication technology has been proposed in this paper. Theoretical estimation of the heat sink thermal resistance is based on the heat sink with overall size of 1 cm ? 1 cm ? 1 cm, and four kinds of structure with various total number of grooves on the surface of fins have been investigated. Finite element analysis has been conducted by using COMSOL Multiphysics where fluid dynamics and heat transfer are taken into account. As a result, the lowest heat sinks thermal resistance of 6.84?C per Watt is achieved for the structure with a larger fin area (13.1 cm2) and a higher inlet air flow rate (4 m/s), suggesting an optimum fin area depending on the air flow rate.


Author(s):  
Melanie Beauchemin ◽  
Jinny Rhee

Heat sinks with cross airflow are commonly used for enhancing the cooling of electronic components. When using heat sinks in avionics applications, the primary heat transfer challenges are due to low air densities, which occur when operating at high altitudes, and space and mass constraints. Because of the spatial constraints, heat sinks with a large surface area per unit volume are advantageous. In general, cylindrical pin-fin heat sinks offer such characteristics. The Nusselt number is used as an indication of the thermal performance of the heat sink for a given Reynolds number. At high altitude, we expect the Reynolds number (based on the fin diameter and maximum velocity, Red,max) to be smaller than 1000. Empirical correlations for the Nusselt number of cylindrical pin-fin heat sinks are available in the literature; however, these correlations were obtained for larger values of Red,max. The objective of this work is to correlate the Nusselt number and the friction factor of an in-line cylindrical pin-fin heat sink with its non-dimensional geometric parameters, and the airflow Reynolds number. The emphasis is on Red,max range between 25 and 1000, which allows the evaluation of the thermal performance of the heat sink for altitudes up to 70,000 feet. The results are obtained using three-dimensional numerical simulations with the commercial CFD software Flotherm. The numerical model is validated against experimental data. The results show that for a given Red,max, the average Nusselt number and friction factor are independent of the altitude for a given heat sink configuration. However, for a given air inlet velocity, an important drop in the average Nusselt number is observed as the altitude increases due to the reduction in air density. The effect of the variation of the fin span-wise and stream-wise pitches, as well as height is also studied.


Author(s):  
Hung-Yi Li ◽  
Ming-Hung Chiang ◽  
Chih-I Lee ◽  
Wen-Jei Yang

This work experimentally studies the thermal performance of plate-fin vapor chamber heat sinks using infrared thermography. The effects of the fin width, the fin height and the Reynolds number on the thermal performance are considered. The results show that generated heat is transferred more uniformly to the base plate by a vapor chamber heat sink than by a similar aluminum heat sink. Therefore, the maximum temperature is effectively reduced. The overall thermal resistance of the vapor chamber heat sink declines as the Reynolds number increases, but the strength of the effect falls. The effect of the fin dimensions on the thermal performance is stronger at a lower Reynolds number.


Author(s):  
T. J. John ◽  
B. Mathew ◽  
H. Hegab

The need for dissipating heat from microsystems has increased drastically in the last decade. Several methods of heat dissipation using air and liquids have been proposed by many studies, and pin-fin micro heat sinks are one among them. Researchers have developed several effective pin-fin structures for use in heat sinks, but not much effort has been taken towards the optimization of profile and dimensions of the pin-fin. In this paper the authors studied the effect of different pin-fin shapes on the thermal resistance and pressure drop in a specific micro heat-sink. Optimization subjected to two different constraints is studied in this paper. The first optimization is subjected to constant flow rate and the second one is subjected to constant pressure drop. Both optimization processes are carried out using computer simulations generated using COVENTORWARE™. Two of the best structures from each of these optimization studies are selected and further analysis is performed for optimizing their structure dimensions such as width, height and length. A section of the total micro heat-sink is modeled for the initial optimization of the pin-fin shape. The model consists of two sections, the substrate and the fluid. Six different shapes: square, circle, rectangle, triangle, oval and rhombus were analyzed in the initial optimization study. Preliminary tests were conducted using the first model described above for a flow rate of 0.6ml/min. The non dimensional overall thermal resistance of the heat sink, and the nondimensional pumping power was calculated from the results. A figure of merit (FOM) was developed using the nondimensional thermal resistance and nondimensional pumping power for each structure with different pin-fin shapes. Smaller the value of FOM better the performance of the heat sink. The study revealed that the circle and ellipse structures have the best performance and the rectangle structure had the worst performance at low flow rates. At high flow rates rectangular and square structures have the best performance.


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