CFD analysis of cross-cut heat sink for electronic cooling

Abstract

The advancement in electronic fields make devices smaller but has high heat flux. Therefore, heat dissipation for electronic devices plays a significant role to ensure their safe and good performance. The heat dissipation components including the heat sink, fans eliminate the heat of electronic devices as soon as possible, or else chips will be damaged, malfunction, sort lifetime by overheating. However, it is difficult to predict its operating temperature. Therefore, the CFD based method has been popularly applied in this field to optimise the design, save time and display the temperature distribution of the electronic device. In this paper, a real cross-cut heat sink's dimension was obtained, and then its model was developed by Inventor software. After that, a CFD based investigation was conducted to evaluate its thermal performance. The simulation was carried out with different powers and air velocity as well as at two rotation angles such as:0o and 90o clockwise around X-axis to evaluate the operation parameters. The results show that this heat sink could be applied for electronic devices with a power lower than 6 W without the fan. The heat sink's thermal resistance can be reduced with the increase of air velocity. Even, the temperature of the 10W chip can go down from 87.5oC to 65oC when the velocity increases from 0 m/s to 0.25 m/s. Furthermore, at a 90o clockwise angle, chip temperature under natural convection is somewhat lower than that at a 0o angle.