Experimental Investigations of a Minichannel Heat Sink for Electronic Applications.

Abstract

In the current study, a new configuration of minichannels is proposed to improve the thermal performance of conventional plate-fin aluminum heat sink used for the thermal management of the electronic components. The case under consideration to implement the current idea is an aluminum heat sink equipped with rectangular square minichannels. Hence, an enhanced model is investigated, and the obtained results are evaluated as compared with the conventional plate-fin aluminum heat sink. A minichannel heat sink (MC-HS) that has 18 parallel minichannels was developed on the aluminum plate and charged with acetone. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed MC-HS startup was successfully under a heat load ranging from 10 to 40 W in the vertical orientation. From the investigations, a MC-HS is found to be more effective for the thermal management of the electronic components than the conventional method. The thermal resistance of the MC-HS is 20–31% lower in comparison with the conventional plate-fin aluminum heat sink. It is shown that the MC-HS not only surpasses the conventional solution but also provides greater thermal management of the electronic components