Thermo-hydraulic investigation of open micro prism pin fin heat sink having varying prism sides

Abstract

The current trend of miniaturization in many electronic devices, like computer processors, high-speed servers, MEMS devices, etc., has shown augmented performance. Still, thermal management is a significant concern for them. The present work performed a numerical analysis on the microchannel heat sink's open micro prism pin fin configuration (MCHS). The influence of prism pin fin sides (3 to 9) has been studied for copper substrate and working fluid water (single phase fluid flow). Finite volume-based commercial code has been opted to perform the numerical simulations. The present configurations simulated different Reynolds numbers (50–300) under the heat flux of 500 kW/m2. Observation revealed that the four-side arrangements have the best performance due to prominent secondary flow leading to efficient fluid mixing, whereas three-side configurations have the worst performance. Further, an increase in pin fin sides from 5 to 9 has almost negligible variation in thermal and hydraulic characteristics because of similar fluid flow characteristics. The four-side micro prism pin fin configuration has been further analysed by varying the prism radius from 0.175 mm to 0.325 mm. It was observed that a prism radius between 0.250 mm and 0.275 mm led to optimum overall performance due to more stable secondary fluid flow.