Characterization of swaged mixed metal heat sinks

The present experimental study investigates the thermal performance of four heatsink combinations based on the forced convection heat transfer mode. The four designs consist of an all aluminum, all copper, copper baseplate/aluminum fin and aluminum baseplate/copper fin heatsink. Each heat sink combination was tested in pairs of heatsinks placed within a vertical wind tunnel of Plexiglas walls such that the fins were positioned vertically and parallel to the airflow inside the tunnel. A block heater providing 800 watts and covering 60% of the baseplate was placed in between two identical heat sinks. Experiments were performed for an approach velocity ranging from 2 m/s to 8 m/s. The average rise in temperature of eight measured locations was used to calculate the thermal resistance. The all copper heatsink provided the lowest thermal resistance while the all aluminum heatsink returned the highest value. The experiments show that there is marginal improvement of 3% in the performance of the copper-base/aluminum-fin heatsink due to the higher conductivity of the copper base. The experiments show that the thermal performance can be improved by up to 14% by increasing the thermal conductivity of the fin material, as in the case of the aluminum-base/copper-fin heatsink.