Lightweight and high-performance air-cooled heat sinks

Rapid increases in the power density of electronic devices have resulted in a challenge of developing lighter cooling systems to dissipate larger amounts of heat compared with currently used thermal management solutions. In an active cooling system, meeting these two requirements simultaneously requires adopting efficient techniques rather than simply increasing the flow rates, in order to avoid a larger-sized fan/pump, as well as a larger pressure drop/pumping power. Since the size of an active cooling system is proportional to the pumping power, enhancing heat transfer should be performed at a constant pumping power to not violate the initial size/weight of the cooling system. This paper describes recent advances in developing lightweight heat sinks for enhancing heat transfer rates without any penalty in pumping power. The proposed heat sinks use perforations that are inserted equidistantly along the length of the fins. The experiments were performed for a wide range of Reynolds numbers from laminar to turbulent flows. The results were compared with those of a regular heat sink without perforations. This paper covers key findings of our several recent publications about developing lightweight and efficient heat sinks.