Experimental Investigation on the Thermal Performance of a Sintered Flexible Woven Heat Sink

A novel flexible woven heat sink (FWHS) composed of sintered copper braided belts was proposed here to meet the heat dissipation requirements of the flexible radiator installed in a narrow space. The sintering treatment was employed to ameliorate the tensile and bending properties as well as the thermal conductivity of the FWHS. The thermal resistance network model and the temperature field analysis in cases of natural convection and forced convection were presented to evaluate the thermal performance of the FWHS. The results show that the FWHS sintered at 850 °C with the expanded shape at a compressed height of 55 mm can reduce the temperature of heat source by 17.1% compared to the uncompressed FWHS, which demonstrates its outstanding advantage of maintaining high efficiency of heat dissipation under compressive deformation.