CFD simulation studies and experimental validation on a parallel plate heat sink

The use of finned heat sinks in air cooled electronics components and assemblies increase the effective surface area for convective heat transfer, thereby, reducing the operating temperatures of these electronic devices. The objective of a heat sink is to achieve maximum heat dissipation, while restricting the consumption of valuable resources such as mass, fan power, pressure drop and space. Optimal design of the heat sink is a significant task. Therefore, preliminary studies on the heat transfer characteristics of a parallel plate heat sink have been carried. In this research work, the geometric parameters considered are fin height, fin thickness, base height and fin pitch. The simulation is carried out with a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package provided by Fluent Inc. Experimental validation of simulation results have been performed. In this study, the geometric parameters namely fin height, fin thickness, base height and fin pitch are found to be optimal at 48 mm, 3 mm, 4 mm and 3 mm...