cfd modelling and experimental study on the fluid flow and heat transfer in copper heat sink design

This thesis is studying the heatsinks new designs for copper heatsinks which utilizes modelling and simulation by CFD, construction of prototypes and experimental works. Challenges and complications in manufacturing of copper heatsinks are expressed and finding the solutions to these hindrances involve in this work. Numerical efforts supported by fluent are made to promote investigation and approaching the goal in which serves the new opportunities for wider application of copper material in heat sinks. However the thermal conductivity of copper is about double as aluminium but still aluminium heatsinks are commonly used for heat dissipation in computers. Comparing of heat performance of two analogous heatsink of different materials, aluminium and copper, is conducted by numerical analysis in the CFD environment. In addition to larger surface area and airflow velocity another solution for enhancement of heat dissipation is suggested. Manufacturing solutions of copper heatsinks are proposed which will facilitate fabrication of more high performance copper heatsinks than the current heavy and expensive models. Our first copper heat sink model is designed exclusively based on the technical observations and analyses of numerical simulation of two identical copper and aluminium heatsinks by CFD and as well as manufacturability concerns. This heat sink is fabricated mechanically and is tested by a number of heat sources and high sensitive devices such as adhesive K type thermocouple, data acquisition 34970A in associated with HP Bench Link program. An extent experimental work on aluminium heatsinks, integrated with forced convection, is performed in order to measure their thermal capacities. Comparison of the heat performance of a typical aluminium heatsink, which was the best among the all aluminium heat sinks and proposed copper heatsink under identical experimental conditions, is performed. Also in some numerical efforts, optimizing and predicting of the therm