Thermal compact modeling of parallel plate heat sinks

Growing complexity of electronic systems has resulted in an increased computational effort in CFD modeling of electronic systems. To reduce the computational effort, one or several heat sinks can be represented by a compact "porous block" model, with an effective thermal conductivity and pressure loss coefficient. In this study of parallel plate heat sinks in laminar forced convection, a methodology is developed to rigorously determine the thermal properties of compact heat sink models that provide a high level of accuracy. The results of an extensive set of CFD simulations for a three heat sink channel covering two distinct heat sink geometries, air velocities from 0.25 m/s to 2 m/s and various spacings between the heat sinks, were used to create and evaluate the fidelity of compact models. The results of this study establish the validity and value in using the porous block compact model representation for noncritical heat sinks in an electronic assembly. The results also reveal that a location-independent porous-block representation can yield excellent agreement in the prediction of the thermal characteristics of state-of-the-art heat sinks.