Effect of phase change material in cross flow and jet impingement cooling techniques used in heat sink for electronics application

This article presents the results of numerical investigation on comparison between two different cooling techniques namely cross flow and jet impingement cooling techniques used in heat sinks for the electronic components. Pin fin heat sink with and without phase change material (PCM) are considered for the investigation. The main focus of this research is to reduce the peak operating temperature of electronic component and pressure drop and to increase the Nusselt number of the heat sinks. Computational fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool is used to model and investigate the heat transfer characteristics across the heat sink. It is found that the cross flow shows superior thermal characteristics compared to jet impingement method due to which the base temperatures of pin fins in cross flow is at an average temperature of 14.5 degrees C lower than that of jet impingement. Furthermore, the use of PCM significantly reduces the operating temperature of the pin fins by an average temperature of 7.5 degrees C for cross flow and 6.1 degrees C for jet impingement flow techniques.