The study of micro-fin heat sinks for electronic cooling applications

Abstract

A variety of pin fin parameters were studied and tested to calculate an empirical relationship which can predict the optimum thermal performance of the micro pin fin structure. The sample parameters tested are as follows: (1) fin size from 0.2 mm to 1.0 mm; (2) fin height from 2.0 mm to 10.0 mm. The errors from comparison of the empirical relationship with the test data are less than 5%, so we can use this empirical relationship to estimate the optimum performance of pin fin heat sinks. According to the results from empirical relationship, the ratio of optimum fin pitch to fin size (fin pitch/fin size) is about 1.5/spl sim/1.7. Greater fin height gives higher thermal performance, and a smaller fin size structure has the potential for better thermal performance than huge fin size structures.