Thermal Characterization of Heat Sinks with Embedded Heat Pipes

摘要

As the power density of power electronics is steadily increasing, innovative cooling techniques are gaining more attention from the industry. Recent advances in the heat pipe technology offers effective solutions for transporting and dissipating heat in modern electronics, where the heat dissipation per unit volume is high. Although heat pipes are used extensively in the aerospace and electronics industry, some operational aspects still requires a better understanding. This paper is an experimental investigation comparing the thermal performance of solid base and heat pipe embedded base heat sinks. The heat sinks were all of swaged fins all aluminum construction. Each heat sink was placed in a wind tunnel such that the fins are positioned parallel to the airflow. A block heater providing 400 W and .covering 4% of the base plate was attached to each heat sink. Experiments were performed for a approaching velocity ranging from 2m/s to 8m/s. The present experimental study investigates the thermal performance of three heatsink combinations based on the forced convection heat transfer mode. The three designs consist of an all Aluminum, Copper baseplate/Aluminum fin and Aluminum baseplate with embedded heatpipes/Aluminum fin heatsink. Each heat sink rise in temperature of three measured locations was used to calculate the thermal resistance. The Aluminum base with embedded heatpipes has the best performance and provides a weight saving compared to the copper baseplate heatsink.