Numerical investigation of heat transfer enhancement in plate-fin heat sinks: Effect of flow direction and fillet profile

Many researchers have studied the thermal performance of heat sinks, however to the best knowledge of the authors, the effect of flow direction (place of fan) on the thermal performance of plate-fin heat sinks with fillet profile have not yet been investigated. In this paper, the investigation develops a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, validated through comparison with an experimental data from the literature, which demonstrates the effect of flow direction and fillet profile on the thermal performance of plate-fin heat sinks. In particular, a plate-fin heat sink with fillet profile subject to parallel flow has been compared with the conventional design (plate-fin heat sink without fillet profile subject to an impinging flow) and satisfactory results have been perceived. The results of this study show that the base temperature along with the thermal resistance of the heat sink is lower for the proposed design. Therefore, the developed approach has strong potential to be used to improve the thermal performance of heat sinks and hence to develop more advanced effective cooling technologies.