Thermal performance of phase change material (PCM) based pin-finned heat sinks for electronics devices: Effect of pin thickness and PCM volume fraction

Adeel Arshad, Hafiz Muhammad Ali*, Muzaffar Ali, Shehryar Manzoor

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

287 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The present experimental investigation focuses on the passive cooling of electronic devices by using phase change material (PCM) based pin-fin heat sinks to increase reliability, to ensure sufficiently lower temperature, to stretch the operating duration and to improve the functionality of installed features. Paraffin wax is used as a PCM and filled in heat sinks made of aluminum. As the thermal conductivity of PCM is very low, aluminum square fins are used as thermal conductivity enhancer (TCE). A volume fraction of TCE is kept constant at 9% and the uniform heat flux is applied to finned and un-finned heat sinks. An un-finned heat sink is used for base line comparison. Fin thicknesses of TCE of 1 mm, 2 mm, and 3 mm with square cross sectional area are investigated with a constant height of 20 mm. Volume fractions of PCM are varied as 0.00, 0.33, 0.66 and 1.00 for each heat sink to determine the thermal performance. The present study reports thermal performance at various heat fluxes to enhance the operating time for different set point temperatures (SPTs) and to compare the latent heat phase duration for various heat sinks tested. The results reveal that maximum thermal performance in operating time is achieved for 2 mm thick pin-fin heat sink filled with PCM volumetric fraction of 1.00.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)143-155
Number of pages13
JournalApplied Thermal Engineering
Volume112
Early online date13 Oct 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 5 Feb 2017
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Heat sink
  • Paraffin wax
  • Phase change materials (PCMs)
  • Thermal conductivity enhancer (TCE)
  • Thermal management (TM)

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