The effect of micro pin-fin shape on the heat transfer performance of micro pin-fin heat sinks

This is the latest version of this item.

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1115/IMECE2010-38581

Micro heat sinks currently find applications in many areas such as in aerospace engineering, micro reactors, electronics cooling, micro turbine cooling, and micro biological applications. Among different types of micro heat sinks, the ones with micro pin-fins are becoming more and more popular due to their high heat transfer performances. There is however not enough experimental data available in the literature to show the effect of pin-fin shape on heat transfer. To address to this lack of information, micro heat sinks with a pin-fin having the same chord thickness/diameter of various shapes (circular, cone shaped, diamond shaped, hydrofoil shaped, rectangular, square and triangular) are numerically modeled, and their heat transfer performances are assessed and compared. The Reynolds number is between 20 and 120 in this study. Applied heat flux to micro pin-fin bases is set to values between 1200 and 7240 W/cm(2). In the current study, micro pin-fins of various shapes are three dimensionally modeled based on a one-to-one scale and evaluated based on their heat transfer performances with the use of commercially available software COMSOL 3.5a. Full Navier-Stokes equations are solved along with continuity and energy equations under steady state conditions for weakly compressible, single phase water flow. For having increased computational efficiency, half of the domain, which consists of a micro pin-fin located inside a micro channel, is modeled with the use of a symmetry plane. In order to validate the use of numerical models, parametric values from previous experimental data available in the literature are exactly taken and simulated. The numerical and experimental results show a good agreement.