Numerical and experimental investigation of twin-side-cooled heat sink for electronic chips

A heat sink is an important component in the electronics industry, used to cool electronic chips and prevent overheating-induced failure. It cools the small electronic components through its large surface area due to the integration of various types of fins. This research article investigates the heat transfer characteristics of the 25 mm × 25 mm × 1 mm chip size with heat generation rates ranging from 8 × 10 5 to 4 × 10 6 W/m 3 . For this, a novel heat sink was proposed, which cools the chip effectively from the top and bottom sides with air and phase change material fluids. The effectiveness of the cooling is enhanced through cooling arrangements inside the heat sink, in which four different cases of the heat sink have been analysed. Cases 1 and 2 used air and phase change material as the cooling fluid alone, but in Cases 3 and 4, hybrid cooling is used to cool the heat sink. The study revealed that Case 2 denotes the minimum temperature of the heat sink. At lower heat generation, air cooling alone maintains the temperature of the heat sink within the required limit. It is found that the optimum condition that corresponds to a heat generation rate of 1.6 × 10 6 W/m 3 , inlet air temperature of 36.16°C and a Reynolds number of 277.77 gives a Nusselt number of 14.72 in Case 1. The maximum heat transfer efficiency for all cases increases from 0.59 to 0.73 between 100 and 500 seconds and then remains constant. At a heat generation rate of 4 × 10 6 W/m 3 , the comparative temperatures for Cases 1–4 are 303.77, 303.27, 304.12 and 305.51 K, respectively.