Author(s)

P. Gauche, C. Coetzer & J.A. Visser

Abstract

Extruded aluminium heat sinks are used ubiquitously in the electronics industry to cool chips, modules and packages because of their simplicity and effectiveness. Due to rapidly increasing chip power dissipation and the need to minimize weight, size, cost and time-to-market, there is a great need to accurately predict the heat transfer in heat sink assemblies. This study involves an investigation of the airflow for forced convection heat sinks. These high performance heat sinks offer a relatively large flow resistance causing flow bypass and leakage from the heat sink. This effectively lowers the fin flow velocity and therefore the performance of the heat sink. A parametric study using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was conducted to determine the characteristics of the flow through and around a typical heat sink.

Keywords