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

D.B. Tuckerman and R.F.W. Pease (1981) showed that microchannels with water flow could be used to cool VLSI systems. Their work required the flow to be laminar, and the channel system, or fin array, was optimized analytically. Recently, it has been shown that, for some geometries and fluid pressure drops, a lower thermal resistance can be found if the channels are designed to allow turbulent flow. The current work uses the optimization scheme developed by R.W. Knight et al. (1991 and in this issue) to design three air-cooled aluminum finned arrays, which were built and tested experimentally. The thermal performances of the fin array designs, one containing 5 fins, one with 11 fins, and one with the predicted optimum of 8 fins, are compared. All arrays had turbulent flow and pressure drop across them, and all fins were the same length and width. The best thermal performance was obtained with the design predicted to be optimal. The scheme can be applied to a variety of heat sink design applications, including water-cooled microchannels