An investigation on the conduction and convection heat transfer from advanced heat sinks

Abstract

In natural convection applications, the components used for cooling may represent a significant portion of the overall weight of the system. Consequently, advanced materials are of interest in such applications, as they may substantially reduce the total size and the weight of the system. Many of these advanced materials have anisotropic thermo physical properties, hence the control of thermal conductivity is crucial. This work is motivated to address the lack of understanding of the use of anisotropic advanced materials in natural convection environments. Numerical simulations are carried out to test the performance of heat sinks made of such materials and comparisons are made with the heat sinks of traditional engineering materials under the same conditions. The results demonstrate that the total weight of the system may be reduced drastically with the use of advanced materials relative to the most commonly used heat sink materials at the same thermal performance. Total resistance, conduction and convection resistances, and a performance related FOM values for each heat sink are presented. It is shown that pyrolytic graphite based heat sinks show the best thermal performance, while Carbon- foam heat sinks offer tremendous performance due to the material's low density.