Review-Design and Analysis of Heat Sink Optimization and its Comparison with Commercially Available Heat Sink

ABSTRACT It is observed that components of modern portable electronic devices with increasing heat loads with decrease in the space available for heat dissipation. The increasing heat load of the device needs to be removed for maintaining the efficient performance of the device. The exponential increase in thermal load in air cooling devices requires the thermal management system (i.e. heat sink) to be optimized to attain the highest performance in the given space. Adding fins to the heat sink increases surface area but it increases the pressure drop. This reduces the volumetric airflow and the heat transfer coefficient. In order to have a better system the number of fins in a given area can be optimized to obtain the effective performance keeping the working temperature less than the critical temperature in the device. In this work, experimentation is performed for high heat flux condition. The heat sink mounted on the hot component for cooling the component under forced convection. The two different orientation of fan i.e. “fan-on-top” and “fan-on-side” are tested for different air mass flow rate and cooling rate is validated with numerical results for the same amount of heat flux. The numerical simulation are performed using computational fluid dynamics (CFD).The primary goal of this work is to find the optimization point for a natural air-cooled heat sink at which the system will continue its operation in natural convection mode, when the fan fails to operate. The CFD simulations will be performed for optimization of heat sink parameters with objective function of maximization of heat transfer coefficient. The optimum combination of parameters and results will be verified and compared with commercially available heat sink.