Thermal Analysis of CPU with variable Heat Sink Base Plate Thickness using CFD

The computational fluid dynamics is concentrated on the forced air cooling of the CPU using a heat sink. This paper utilizes CFD to identify a cooling solution for a desktop computer, which uses an 80 W CPU maximum whereas this number will be increased in the range of 70-120W in the forthcoming desktop computer systems. The design is able to cool the chassis with one fan with air blowing over heat sink attached to the CPU is adequate to cool the whole system and the power supply fan. This paper considers the optimal plate fin heat sink design and cylindrical fin heat sink design with variable copper base plate and the control of CPU heat sink processes. To have a better heat dispersion performance, a computational fluid dynamics is utilized to search for an optimal set of plate-fin or cylindrical fin shape parameters. Base plate thickness, fin thickness, fin profile and fin material parameters are to be handled together due to the frequently encountered space limitations. Three different thickness Plate and cylindrical heat sink designs with 2.5mm to 5mm thickness copper base plate are analyzed by using commercial CFD software packages Gambit and Fluent. The well converged, grid independent and well posed simulations are performed, and the results are compared with the experimental data. Especially, replacing aluminum with copper as base plate material improved the performance. This study will benefit the design engineers involved in electronic cooling and also help to reduce the significant increases in the sound power emitted by the CPU.