Effect of different geometry flow pattern on heat sink performance

Abstract

How to achieve appropriate operating temperatures in present-day electronic equipment is a matter of fervent discussion in the current technical literature. The highly demanding cooling requirements of these devices are a quite a challenging topic. In the present work some different non-conventional patterns for liquid cooled heat sinks are proposed. These new flow patterns distribute homogeneously the working fluid through the whole system promoting the enhanced of the heat sink performance and the uniformity temperature distribution at the base of the heat sink. These configurations consist of a flow inlet at the center of the heat sink (with the purpose of feeding the radial serpentine channels), and several flow outlets located on the outer side of the heat sink. Different cases are studied by varying the number of channels, channel length, and number of spirals used. Deionized water is selected as working fluid, considering in this study the dependence of fluid viscosity in regards with temperature, this parameter has shown to be crucial in thermal analysis of heat sinks. Each case studied shows a particular performance, thus, the pressure drop, the average temperature, the total dissipated energy, and other comparative parameters are reported to discuss advantages and disadvantages of every configuration.