Analysis of Splayed Pin Fin Heat Sinks for Electronic Cooling using Advanced Materials

Abstract

Seamless advancements in the electronics industry lead to high heat fluxes from very limited thermal real estates. The removal of excessive heat from system components is essential to avoid damaging effects of burning or overheating. Therefore the enhancement of heat transfer is an important subject of thermal engineering. Extended surfaces (fins) are frequently used in heat exchanging devices for the purpose of increasing the heat transfer between a primary surface and the surrounding fluid. The effective thermal management plays a vital role in the design and operation of electronic equipment. To obtain higher performance from a heat sink, more surface area, less weight and lower cost are necessary. Thus, efforts to obtain more optimized design i.e. Splayed pin fin heat sinks and advanced composite materials are needed to achieve high thermal performance. The present study involves a splayed pin fin heat sink with advanced materials (Polyphenylene Sulphide (PPS), Carbon Foam, Graphite Epoxy) to ensure a reliable converter to extract these heat losses to limit temperature increases in the semiconductor device that would jeopardize reliability and performance, specifically keeping the device from exceeding its maximum operating temperature. It is observed that from the results the total weight of the system reduced drastically with the use of advanced materials at the same thermal performance.