Investigation on thermal characteristics of nano enhanced phase change material based finned and unfinned heat sinks for thermal management system

Abstract This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the combined effect of nanoparticle concentration and fin number in phase change material (PCM) based heat sinks for thermal management system. Here, aluminum and paraffin wax are considered as heat sink (HS) material and PCM, respectively. Aluminum oxide is chosen as nanoparticle material in this study. Tests are conducted with different HS configurations (unfinned, one finned and three finned) and various nanoparticle concentrations (0, 2, 4 and 6 wt%) for q ″  = 2.0 kW/m2. The evolution and propagation of melt front inside the HS is studied through photographic observation. The highest value of operating time is found to be 6470 s for conventional pure PCM based three finned HS assembly. The maximum reduction in melting time is found to be 9%, 13% and 26% for NePCM based unfinned, one finned and three finned heat sinks, respectively. Results indicate that NePCM with lower value of nanoparticle concentration is useful for the heat sinks with SPT value of 60 °C. The maximum enhancement ratio of 1.48 is obtained for unfinned HS filled with 2% nanoparticle concentration for SPT of 60 °C. The maximum value of enhancement ratio is found to be 1.35 and 1.32 for SPT of 65 °C and 70 °C, respectively for the conventional pure PCM based HS.