Heat Transfer Enhancement of Small Scale Heat Sinks Using Vibrating Pin Fin

Abstract

Heat sinks are widely adopted in electronics cooling together with different technologies to enhance the cooling process. For the small electronics application, the small scale pin fins heat sinks are extensively used to dissipate heat in electronics devices. Due to the limit of space in the small devices, it is impossible to increase heat transfer area. In order to improve the heat transfer performance, the applying the forced vibration is one of challenging method. This study applies the vibration frequency between 50 to 1,000 Hz to pin fins heat sinks. The results of numerical simulation clearly show satisfied heat transfer augmentation. However, the Pressure drop significantly increases with frequency. This phenomenon affects the heat transfer enhancement performance that it increases with frequency until certain value then it drops rapidly. The results of this study can help designing heat sinks for electronics cooling by employing the concept of vibration.