Hydrothermal performance of a heat sink using Plate-fins: Experimental and numerical investigations

The development of electronic devices is accompanied by the generation of significant heat. A novel plate-fins design with various orientation angles of 30°, 35°, 37.5°, 40° and 45° was studied. The plate-fins design aims to boost the performance by increasing the surface area and redirecting airflow towards the heat sink plate. The experimental results obtained by this work were employed to validate the numerical results for pin-fins heat sink. A three-dimensional computational domain was investigated using ANSYS Fluent 19.1. The air flow was turbulent and modelled using k-ω turbulent flow. The plate-fins with an orientation angle of 37.5ᴼ exhibit the optimum hydrothermal performance among other configurations. Equally, several optimisation parameters including the number of rows, the diameter and thickness of the pins and the width of the plate-fins were investigated. It was observed that the heat sink with two rows of plate-fins outperformed other designs. This configuration resulted in a significant reduction of 2 % in hot spot temperature and a notable reduction of 60.8 % in pressure drop.