Experimental investigation on the thermal performance of a heat sink filled with PCM

Abstract

Electronic devices and technologies have been revolutionized to meet future needs and users demands in terms of size, cost, and performance. Therefore, miniaturized devices have been of great interest and under investigation for the last decade. This demand requires attaining no less performance than achieved with large scale devices and designs. Hence, it becomes crucial to improve performance through changing physical design and/or utilized materials such as using composites or phase change material (PCM). In this study, two designs for heat sinks in the form of plates were created. The first was solid, whereas the second was hollow and contained PCM. Both of them were subjected to the same experiment conditions. The goal of the research is to figure out the overall temperature accomplished of both samples and to determine the impact of adding PCM to heat sinks thermal performance. The general design methodology for the heat sink is as follow: a steady heat source is applied to the plate fin heat sink's base. The plate heat sink's thermal efficiency was compared with and without the use of PCM. The results revealed that including PCM into the heat sink plate improves cooling and maintains the target temperature. Furthermore, the heat sink with a PCM outperformed by 30% compared to heat sink without PCM.

Keywords

• Heat sink
• Phase Change materials (PCM)
• Heat transfer
• Fins