Analysis of Flow Characteristics and Pressure Drop for an Impinging Plate Fin Heat Sink with Elliptic Bottom Profiles

Abstract

The performance of impingement air cooled plate fin heat sinks differs significantly from that of parallel flow plate fin heat sinks. The impinging flow situations at the entrance and the right-angled bends of the plate fin heat sink are quite involved. Flow characteristics of a plate fin heat sink with elliptic bottom profiles cooled by a rectangular impinging jet with different inlet widths are studied by numerical simulations. The results of pressure drop of numerical simulations and experimental results match quite well. The numerical results show that at the same flow rate, the pressure drop decreases with the increase of the impingement inlet width, and the pressure drop increases significantly with the increase of the fin height. The larger the impingement inlet width of air-cooled plate fin heat sink, the milder the pressure drop changes with velocity. Pressure drop for an impinging plate fin heat sink without elliptic bottom profiles is larger than that with elliptic bottom profiles at the same inlet width and velocity. Based on the fundamental developing laminar continuum flow theory, an improved model which is very concise and nice for quick real world approximations is proposed. Furthermore, this paper verifies the effectiveness of this simple impinging pressure drop model.