Thermal enhancement of heat sinks with bio-inspired textured surfaces

The current requirements of the electronics industry for heat sink design are to increase heat dissipation and to reduce the occupied space and weight. Research to improve the thermal efficiency and reduce the size of heat sinks has mainly been conducted by modifying their geometry to increase the heat transfer area. In the field of tribology research, one way to modify a surface is to apply texture, which involves reducing the contact area but increasing the external area, which in turn could improve the performance of heat dissipation devices. In this paper, bio-textured surfaces are fabricated on straight fin heat sinks and numerically evaluated by thermal finite element analysis. The simulation results are validated by experimental measurements on a single-fin heat sink. The potential of surface texturing in heat sinks is demonstrated here through a numerical parametric analysis of a full-scale heat sink. The results show a reduction in operating temperatures of more than 26 %, reduction in thermal resistance around 34 % and increase between 21 % and 40 % of heat sink effectiveness for textured surface heat sinks compared to smooth fin heat sinks, depending on the convection coefficient. These results suggest that the design methodology proposed here is more relevant for heat sinks used in high power dissipation applications such as computer CPUs and GPUs.