Fin Configuration Affects under Natural Convection Heat Transfer for Rectangular Fin Heatsink Using Steady-State Thermal Analysis

Heatsinks are significant to IC devices as they prevent the chip from overheating. The present study investigates different configurations of rectangular fin heat sinks. Autodesk Fusion 360 is used to design a finite element modelling-based to study the effects of different configurations of the rectangular heat sink design with aluminium and copper materials. The modified configurations of the rectangular fin heat sink, which are in-line and staggered, were studied under natural convection heat transfer. These models were analyzed using different mesh conditions by varying the element size for each fin configuration. Using Ansys Workbench, the steady-state thermal analysis was observed based on the maximum temperature and total heat flux under various heat loads (8 W, 12 W and 24 W). The simulation shows that finer-size elements gave a stable result in the total heat flux but did not show a significant difference in the maximum junction temperature. The in-line fin configuration with copper material showed the lowest maximum junction temperature. The result was consistent at all heat loads. Furthermore, the in-line fin configuration also gave the highest total heat flux among other configurations at all heat loads for both copper and aluminium materials. The conducted studies can be used as initial findings to achieve an optimum design based on fin configurations and predict the heat flow parameters in a rectangular fin heatsink.