Optimal thermal design of air cooled forced convection finned heat sinks-experimental verification

The heat sink optimization scheme presented by R.W. Knight et al. (1992) is shown to yield the design of a heat sink which will give lowest thermal resistance under specified operating constraints. The predicted optimal design is shown to give a thermal resistance that was 19% lower than a system with three fewer fins and 13% lower than a system with three more fins. The experimentally observed values of resistance were higher than the predicted values, due primarily to the overprediction of volumetric flow rates. The design scheme verified is sufficiently general to be applied to any size heat sink or any coolant, including water-cooled microchannels