Study of Bridge Rectangular Fin Heat Sink and the Effect of Angle Change on CPU Cooling

Abstract

The drastic technological growth and development of advanced computer processors leads to a serious problem due to the generation of heat. Modern processors are designed in such a way that even though small in appearance their performances are beyond our thought. The performance of processors directly depends on the heat they generate. The heat generated while processing is generally considered as waste heat that needs to be removed immediately before it could fail the heat sensitive components present inside the processor. There comes a problem of removing this waste heat. Bridge Rectangular Fin Heat sink (BRFHS) is an object having a single base and fin-like protrusions made of aluminium and pyrolytic graphite material because of their high thermal conductivity. ANSYS Fluent CFD Version 12.1 software package was used for simulation. Air is used as a fluid and a comparative study was done for the same heat sink configurations between the aluminium and pyrolytic graphite. In this work, the effect of angle of fin changes was also analysed for aluminium and pyrolytic graphite. It was found that at a fluid velocity of 1.2 m/s, the maximum fin temperature for aluminium was 320 K while and that for pyrolytic graphite was 310 K. The optimum cooling is achieved by BRFHS having an angle of 22.5° simulated with pyrolytic graphite material at 1.2 m/s air velocity. The maximum temperature found on the fin after dissipation of heat was 302 K which is very near to the ambient temperature.

Keywords

• bridge rectangular fin
• heat sink
• processor