CFD Analysis of Flow and Heat Transfer in a Novel Heat Sink for Electronic Devices

Novel flow channel configurations in heat sinks for electronics cooling were proposed in this paper. Computational analyses were carried out to better understand the heat transfer performance, the uniformity of temperature fields of the heat sinking surface, as well as the pressure losses and pumping power in the operation of heat sinks. Comparison of the overall performance regarding to temperature uniformity on the heat sink surface and pumping power consumption was made for heat sinks having novel flow channel configurations and having traditional flow channel configurations. It has been found that the novel flow channel configuration dramatically reduces the pressure loss in the flow field. Giving the same pumping power consumption of an electronics cooling process, the temperature difference on surface of the heat sink which has novel flow channel configuration can be much lower than that of the heat sinks which have traditional flow channel configurations.