Heat sink design optimization using the thermal bottleneck concept

Abstract

Calculation and display of a thermal bottleneck scalar field as an integrated part of a CFD simulation enables a practitioner to interact with and understand the physical mechanisms by which heat is removed from an electronics system. By applying the characteristics of this thermal bottleneck scalar to heat sink design aspects, one can identify near optimal solutions with a minimal number of simulations. This work will detail the principles of using thermal bottleneck information to optimize fin thickness distribution and copper slug design and compare the results to that obtained by more traditional Design of Experiments and numerical optimization techniques.