Thermal performance of heat sink using nano-enhanced phase change material (NePCM) for cooling of electronic components

Abstract Present experimental study reports the thermal performance of nano-enhanced phase change material (NePCM) based thermal energy storage system for cooling of electronic components. The NePCM based heat sink (HS) cooling is a passive cooling technique that can eliminate the fan-based conventional cooling technique. A plate heater was used to impersonate the heat generated by microelectronics. Here, copper oxide (CuO), paraffin wax, and aluminum are considered as nanoparticle, phase change material (PCM), and HS material, respectively. Different HS configurations such as HS with no fin (HSNF), HS with rectangular plate fins (HSRPF), HS with square pin fins (HSSPF), and HS with circular pin fins (HSCPF) are studied for a fixed volume fraction of fin material. The performance of various HS configurations are analyzed for different nanoparticle concentration (∅=0.5–3.0), and heat flux values (q′′=1.5–3.0 kW/m2). For ∅= 3.0, thermal conductivity and viscosity of NePCM are found to increase by 150% and 100%, respectively. The HSSPF involving PCM/NePCM exhibits better thermal performance compared to other HS configurations. The maximum reduction in temperature is found to be 13 °C and 15 °C for HSSPF involving PCM and NePCM (∅= 0.5), respectively. The highest enhancement ratio of 5.0 is obtained for HSSPF at q″= 2.0 kW/m2 for SPT of 65 °C. The addition of CuO nanoparticle beyond ∅=0.5 decreases the HS performance considerably.