Porous Metal Foam Integrated in Pin Fin Heat Sink for Cooling Applications - A Computational Study

Abstract

Recently there exist rapid advancements in different parts of electronics devices that produces significant amount of heat. Pin fin heat sinks are mainly employed for extraction of heat from such devices; recently use of porous material in heat sinks enhanced their heat transfer properties. In this study a metal foam pin fin (MFPF) heat sink is proposed for thermal management of high power electronic devices. Thermo-hydraulic performance of MFPF heat sink are numerically simulated under local thermal equilibrium (LTE) condition taking incompressible air as working fluid modeled using k-ε turbulence model. The heat transfer, velocity streamlines and pressure drop characteristics are assessed in the computational domain. In this study, the effects of fluid velocity (1, 3, 5 and 7 m/s), porosity (0.7, 0.8 and 0.9), permeability (10-8, 10-7 m2), and different shapes (Cylindrical, Conical, Square and Square with Diamond arrangement) of fin has been considered in the simulation keeping another parameter constant. The results shows that at higher velocity (7m/s) square fin diamond arrangement is performing better than other shapes and for lower velocity (1m/s) conical fin is showing better heat transfer performance. Metal foam heat sinks are not in common use due to very less advancement in manufacturing fields and very high cost. Due to its high cost metal foam are used in high end applications, but in near future they will be very useful. Introduction of metal foam heat sinks highly increases the performance of heat sinks, but at the expense of pressure loss.