Chapter 33 - PCM-based heat sink for thermal management of electronic chips

Abstract

The electronic chip is considered the heart of electronic devices. The electronic chips are made by embedding transistors on the silicon chip. With time, the number of transistors has kept rising because of higher computational requirements, which leads to a rise in the chips’ temperature. The high temperature has been the primary reason for the failure of electronic devices in recent reports. The study presents an experimental approach for designing a phase change material (PCM) filled heat sink (HS) to main maintain the safe operating temperature of electronic chips used in computers. The influence of the type of PCM, varying heat load, natural convection, and forced convection has been studied. Under natural convection, the findings indicate that the PCM-filled HS maintains a lower temperature than the unfilled HS. The base temperature of the HS filled with 1-Hexadecanol and paraffin wax was found to be 62.8°C and 63.7°C at 3200W/m2 heat flux input, respectively, which is 14% and 12.7% less than that of the HS without PCM. The performance of the HS with forced convection induced by DC fan reduces the base temperature significantly. The base temperature of the heat sink is reduced by 57.1% by using forced convection for the unfilled HS. The effect of the PCMs is found to have a reverse effect on the steady-state base temperature (SSBT) in forced convection conditions when compared to HS under natural convection. But the transient behavior of the PCM-filled HS is found to be better than the unfilled HS. Hence, the PCM-based HSs are well suited for the thermal management of the electronic chips at intermediate loads under natural convection. This can be integrated with active cooling system/systems to form a hybrid HS to address a wide range of challenges.