Thermo-hydraulic performance of modified plate fin and pin fin heat sinks

Author(s):  
Anil Kumar Patil ◽  
Vishwjeet Choudhary ◽  
Ayush Gupta ◽  
Manoj Kumar

Extended surfaces are widely investigated for their ability to enhance the heat transfer rates in different applications. Pin-fin and plate-fin heat sinks are used in a variety of cases involving a miniaturized to the large systems. The present study compares the performance of the pin-fin and the plate-fin heat sink under similar forced flow conditions. The experimental data for a modified pin fin heat sink with wings and a plate-fin heat sink with dimples are collected for the Reynolds number in the range of 6800–15100. The Nusselt number, friction factor, and thermo-hydraulic performance (THP) are examined for different geometries of the heat sink and the enhancements brought out in the heat transfer and friction are gauged relative to the smooth plate. The pin fin heat sink yields two-fold enhancement in heat transfer as compared to the plate-fin heat sink. The maximum thermo-hydraulic performance of the pin-fin heat sink with wings is found to be 4.52 at a pitch ratio (S/Df) of 2 and Wing length ratio (Lw/Df). For the plate fin heat sink with dimples, the maximum thermo-hydraulic performance is found to be 4.67 at dimple diameter ratio (D/d) of 0.5 and dimple pitch ratio (s/d) of 2.5. The correlations of the Nusselt number and friction factor are proposed for different geometries of fins.

Author(s):  
Abel M. Siu Ho ◽  
Weilin Qu ◽  
Frank Pfefferkorn

The pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics of a single-phase micro-pin-fin heat sink were investigated experimentally. Fabricated from 110 copper, the heat sink consisted of 1950 staggered micro-pins with 200×200 μm2 cross-section by 670 μm height. Deionized water was employed as the cooling liquid. A coolant inlet temperature of 25°C, and two heat flux levels, q" eff = 50 W/cm2 and q" eff = 100 W/cm2, defined relative to the planform area of the heat sink, were tested. The inlet Reynolds number ranged from 93 to 634 for q" eff = 50 W/cm2, and 127 to 634 for q" eff = 100 W/cm2. The measured pressure drop and temperature distribution were used to evaluate average friction factor and local averaged heat transfer coefficient/Nusselt number. Predictions of the Moores and Joshi friction factor correlation and the Chyu et al. heat transfer correlation that were developed using macro-size pin-fin arrays were compared to micro-pin-fin heat sink data. While the Moores and Joshi correlation provide acceptable predictions, the Chyu et al. correlation overpredicted local Nusselt number data by a fairly large margin. These findings point to the need for further study of single-phase thermal/fluid transport process in micro-pin-fin heat sinks.


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):  
Ali Kosar ◽  
Chih-Jung Kuo ◽  
Yoav Peles

An experimental study on thermal-hydraulic performance of de-ionized water over a bank of shrouded NACA 66-021 hydrofoil micro pin fins with wetted perimeter of 1030-μm and chord thickness of 100 μm has been performed. Average heat transfer coefficients have been obtained over effective heat fluxes ranging from 4.0 to 308 W/cm2 and mass velocities from 134 to 6600 kg/m2s. The experimental data is reduced to the Nusselt numbers, Reynolds numbers, total thermal resistances, and friction factors in order to determine the thermal-hydraulic performance of the heat sink. It has been found that prodigious hydrodynamic improvement can be obtained with the hydrofoil-based micro pin fin heat sink compared to the circular pin fin device. Fluid flow over pin fin heat sinks comprised from hydrofoils yielded radically lower thermal resistances than circular pin fins for a similar pressure drop.


Author(s):  
D. Sahray ◽  
H. Shmueli ◽  
N. Segal ◽  
G. Ziskind ◽  
R. Letan

In the present work, horizontal-base pin fin heat sinks exposed to free convection in air are studied. They are made of aluminum, and there is no contact resistance between the base and the fins. For the same base dimensions the fin height and pitch vary. The fins have a constant square cross-section. The edges of the sink are blocked: the surrounding insulation is flush with the fin tips. The effect of fin height and pitch on the performance of the sink is studied experimentally and numerically. In the experiments, the heat sinks are heated using foil electrical heaters. The heat input is set, and temperatures of the base and fins are measured. In the corresponding numerical study, the sinks and their environment are modeled using the Fluent 6 software. The results show that heat transfer enhancement due to the fins is not monotonic. The differences between sparsely and densely populated sinks are analyzed for various fin heights. Also assessed are effects of the blocked edges as compared to the previously studied cases where the sink edges were exposed to the surroundings.


Author(s):  
Stephen A. Andrews ◽  
William D. E. Allan

An experiment was conducted on the effects of streamwise stagger on heat transfer and pressure drop in a pin-fin array. The data were analyzed so as to highlight how stagger could be used to design a pin fin array for the lowest possible pressure loss. Design of arrays for low pressure loss is important in electronics cooling applications. They require large amounts of heat to be extracted from fixed areas, using a minimum of power to do so. This analysis found that the minimum friction factor occurred at a streamwise stagger of approximately 12% of the range between fully inline and fully staggered. By fixing the pin diameter, varying the stagger resulted in a 63% reduction in friction factor with only a 18% reduction in the Nusselt number, based on the array footprint. Additionally, it was found that for a fixed Nusselt number, the pin diameter could vary within a finite range, with decreasing diameters permitting arrays with more efficient degrees of stagger which continued to carry the required heating/cooling load.


Author(s):  
Duckjong Kim ◽  
Sung Jin Kim

In the present work, a novel compact modeling method based on the volume-averaging technique and its application to the analysis of fluid flow and heat transfer in pin fin heat sinks are presented. The pin fin heat sink is modeled as a porous medium. The volume-averaged momentum and energy equations for fluid flow and heat transfer in pin fin heat sinks are obtained using the local volume-averaging method. The permeability, the Ergun constant and the interstitial heat transfer coefficient required to solve these equations are determined experimentally. To validate the compact model proposed in this paper, 20 aluminum pin fin heat sinks having a 101.43 mm × 101.43 mm base size are tested with an inlet velocity ranging from 1 m/s to 5 m/s. In the experimental investigation, the heat sink is heated uniformly at the bottom. Pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics of pin fin heat sinks obtained from the porous medium approach are compared with experimental results. Upon comparison, the porous medium approach is shown to predict accurately the pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics of pin fin heat sinks. Finally, surface porosities of the pin fin heat sink for which the thermal resistance of the heat sink is minimal are obtained under constraints on pumping power and heat sink size. The optimized pin fin heat sinks are shown to be superior to the optimized straight fin heat sinks in thermal performance by about 50% under the same constraints on pumping power and heat sink size.


1990 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. L. Lehmann ◽  
S. J. Kosteva

An experimental study of forced convection heat transfer is reported. Direct air cooling of an electronics packaging system is modeled by a channel flow, with an array of uniformly sized and spaced elements attached to one channel wall. The presence of a single or complete row of longitudinally finned heat sinks creates a modified flow pattern. Convective heat transfer rates at downstream positions are measured and compared to that of a plain array (no heat sinks). Heat transfer rates are described in terms of adiabatic heat transfer coefficients and thermal wake functions. Empirical correlations are presented for both variations in Reynolds number (5000 < Re < 20,000) and heat sink geometry. It is found that the presence of a heat sink can both enhance and degrade the heat transfer coefficient at downstream locations, depending on the relative position.


Author(s):  
Eric D. Truong ◽  
Erfan Rasouli ◽  
Vinod Narayanan

A combined experimental and computational fluid dynamics study of single-phase liquid nitrogen flow through a microscale pin-fin heat sink is presented. Such cryogenic heat sinks find use in applications such as high performance computing and spacecraft thermal management. A circular pin fin heat sink in diameter 5 cm and 250 micrometers in depth was studied herein. Unique features of the heat sink included its variable cross sectional area in the flow direction, variable pin diameters, as well as a circumferential distribution of fluid into the pin fin region. The stainless steel heat sink was fabricated using chemical etching and diffusion bonding. Experimental results indicate that the heat transfer coefficients were relatively unchanged around 2600 W/m2-K for flow rates ranging from 2–4 g/s while the pressure drop increased monotonically with the flow rate. None of the existing correlations in literature on cross flow over a tube bank or micro pin fin heat sinks were able to predict the experimental pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics. However, three dimensional simulations performed using ANSYS Fluent showed reasonable (∼7 percent difference) agreement in the average heat transfer coefficients between experiments and CFD simulations.


Author(s):  
Massimiliano Rizzi ◽  
Ivan Catton

An experimental study of a pin fin heat sink was carried out in support of the development of heat sink optimization methods requiring more detailed measurements be made. Measurements of heat flux and temperature are used to separately determine heat transfer coefficients for the pins and the base region between the pins. Three pitch to diameter ratios (distance from pin center to pin center measured diagonally) were studied: P/d = 3/1, 9/4, 3/2. Heat generation was accomplished using cartridge heaters inserted into a copper block. The high thermal conductivity of the copper ensured that the surface beneath the heat sink would be at a constant temperature. The cooling fluid was air and the experiments were conducted with a Reynolds numbers based on a porous media type hydraulic diameter ranging from 500 to 25000. The channel had a shroud that touches the fin tips, eliminating any flow bypass. The pin surface heat transfer coefficients match the values reported by Kays and London and by Zukauskas. The base region heat transfer coefficients were, surprisngly, larger than the pin values.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2702
Author(s):  
Miao Qian ◽  
Jie Li ◽  
Zhong Xiang ◽  
Chao Yan ◽  
Xudong Hu

To improve the efficiency of hydrogen-producing microreactors with non-uniform pin-fin array, the influence of the pin diameter degressive gradient of the non-uniform pin-fin array (NPFA) on heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics is analyzed in this study via numerical simulation under low Reynolds number conditions. Because correlations in prior studies cannot be used to predict the Nusselt number and pressure drop in the NPFA, new heat transfer and friction factor correlations are developed in this paper to account for the effect of the pin diameter degressive gradient, providing a method for the optimized design of the pin diameter degressive gradient for a microreactor with NPFA. The results show that the Nusselt number and friction factor under a low Reynolds number are quite sensitive to the pin diameter degressive gradient. Based on the new correlations, the exponents of the pin diameter degressive gradient for the friction factor and Nusselt number were 6.9 and 2.1, respectively, indicating the significant influence of the pin diameter degressive gradient on the thermal and hydrodynamic characteristics in the NPFA structure.


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