Impingement air cooled plate fin heat sinks

Abstract

The performance of impingement air cooled plate fin heat sinks differs significantly from that of parallel flow plate fin heat sinks. The present work addresses impingement air cooled plate fin heat sinks for electronic components. Simple impingement flow pressure drop and thermal resistance models based on developing laminar flow in rectangular channels are proposed. Both models are constituted from simple momentum and energy balances and utilize fundamental solutions from heat transfer and fluid dynamics to predict their constitutive components. To test the validity of the models' predictions, experimental measurements of pressure drop and thermal resistance are performed with heat sinks of various impingement inlet widths, fin spacings, fin heights and flow velocities. The models are expected to achieve accuracies within 20% for pressure drop and within 20% for thermal resistance at channel Reynolds numbers less than 1200. The simple models are suitable for impingement air cooled heat sink parametric design studies.