Experimental determination of the thermal performance of a free standing fin Structure copper heatsink

New design, experimental and numerical efforts, optimization and manufacturing process constitute the elements of investigation of this paper. The fundamental objective of the present study is to compute the thermal dissipation capability of a new design constructed for copper heatsinks and also deals with challenges in manufacturing of these components. A part of experimental efforts are conducted to estimate the thermal characteristic of the offered heatsink. The numerical analysis is performed to generally predict the effect of thermal conductivity of materials on the heat dissipation rate by heatsinks. Optimization by experimental approach is also conducted to evaluate the flow parameters and to establish a compromise between the characteristics of the flow regime and the geometric identity of the design. Numerical investigation is performed by CFD to evaluate and compare heat dissipation capabilities of aluminium and copper heatsinks. Manufacturing solutions are proposed which would facilitate fabrication of more high performance copper heatsinks. The intention is to illustrate the potential of copper cooling components to meet increasing demands for smaller and more powerful processors, which require greater heat dissipation. Efforts are focused to design an easily manufactured heat sink with enhanced thermal performance while minimizing variables such as weight and cost. A copper heat sink with superior thermal characterisation is designed based on the theoretical analysis of the numerical efforts as well as manufacturability concerns. Comparison of the thermal characteristic of both the proposed copper design and a typical aluminium heatsink was then performed under identical experimental conditions. At the first phase of the experimental efforts, we compared thermal capability of 5 different aluminium (plate and pin fins) heatsinks using in the computers. The best aluminium heatsink based on the maximum thermal capacity criteria is selected. The copper heat sink design arrived upon in this study consists of an array of copper fins 0.2mm in thickness. This design was compared with an aluminium heatsink designated for AthlonXp 2800+.