CFD Analysis of Extracted Fluid Volume for Predicting Pressure Drop in Additively Manufactured Cold Plates with Complex Fin Patterns

It is important to have robust method of prediction of thermal performance during the product design phase of development of cooling solutions for electronics equipment. The traditional method of modeling and analysis of cold plates involves using empirical correlations to predict pressure drop for standard fin geometries used for various designs. A more robust approach for predicting pressure drop is to perform detailed CFD analysis for a given cold plate designs. Conventional CFD analysis of fluid flow through cold plates requires meshing of the details of the cold plates (passages and the fin structures) as well as the fluid volumes in the cold plates. For complex fin patterns produced by additive manufacturing, this can be highly computationally expensive. A new analytical technique of performing CFD analysis of only the extracted fluid volume of the cold plate design has been developed, which has greatly reduced the amount of time required to mesh and solve complex fin structures in cold plate fluid passages. This offers significant benefits by reducing analytical turn around times. Additionally, this new methodology also enables more trade study efforts, thus allowing more optimal coldplate designs. In this paper several examples will be presented with predictions of pressure drop by CFD analysis. Predictions have been found to track very well with experimental measurement of pressure drop. Further, empirical analytical methods will also be explored to predict the pressure drop based on geometry considerations. Finally a comparison will be provided with results from CFD Analysis, experimental data, as well as analytical model.