Augmenting forced convection heat transfer coupled with an aerodynamic surface and a synthetic jet

Forced convection heat transfer is limited with the fan flow rate or pressure drop. Therefore, it is necessary to develop novel cooling technologies that can enhance forced convection. A new heat sink design is proposed for electronics cooling applications. The objective of this study was to develop a new heat sink design, which increases heat transfer properties while containing the pressure drop. Two-dimensional CFD analysis was used to optimize the shape of the heat sink. Enhancing the heat transfer characteristics also increased the pressure drop and hence the fan power. It is observed that lower heat sink surface temperatures are highly non-linear and produce significantly larger pressure drops. A new aerodynamic heat sink shape is proposed by integrating aerodynamic flow characteristics and fan performance curves. The results show that a good compromise for higher heat transfer properties while marginally increasing the pressure drop is possible. However, we believe that further optimization of this technology will enable lower thermal resistance at the same pressure drop compared to baseline forced convection in the same flow rate.