NUMERICAL ANALYSIS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF THE HEAT SINK WITH DIFFERENT FIN ANGLES

ABSTRACT Heat dissipation techniques are the prime concern to remove the waste heat produced by Electronic Devices, to keep them within permissible operating temperature limits. Heat dissipation techniques include heat sinks, fans for air cooling, and other forms of cooling such as liquid cooling. Heat produced by electronic devices and circuitry must be dissipated to improve reliability and prevent premature failure. Integrated circuits such as CPUs, chipset, graphic cards, and hard disk drives are susceptible to temporary malfunction or permanent failure if overheated. As a result, efficient cooling of electronic devices remains a challenge in thermal engineering. The objective of this project is to present an Optimal Heat Sink for efficient cooling of electronic devices. The choice of an optimal heat sink depends on a number of geometric parameters such as fin height, fin length, fin thickness, number of fins, base plate thickness, space between fins, fin shape or profile, material etc. Therefore for an optimal heat sink design, initial studies on the fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics of a standard pin fin, splayed pin fin and Hybrid pin fin heat sinks have been carried through CFD modeling and simulations. It is observed from the results that optimum cooling is achieved by splayed & hybrid pin fin heat sinks. These heat sink designs promises to keep electronic circuits 20 to 40% cooler than standard pin-fin heat sinks. Keywords: Heat Sink, heat dissipation and CFD modeling and simulations.