Pressure Loss and Heat Transfer Through Heat Sinks Produced by Selective Laser Melting

Heat removal from electronic packages is often assisted with the use of heat sinks whose heat transfer surfaces come in a variety of forms such as cylindrical pins, flat fins, and corrugated sheet. These conventional designs are manufactured by traditional methods such as forging, machining, casting, stamping and bending, or a combination of processes. This article introduces a novel manufacturing technique, selective laser melting (SLM), and demonstrates its ability to fabricate new designs of heat sink that have not previously been considered, primarily due to their geometric complexity. Three novel finned structures have been manufactured and their thermal and fluid flow characteristics have been determined experimentally. The three heat sinks demonstrate selective laser melting's ability to produce fine detail and consist of a staggered elliptical array, an elliptical array where the pins are angled in a direction perpendicular to the flow, and a densely packed diamond array. The novel heat sink designs were compared to a cylindrical pin array manufactured using the SLM process as well as with pin fin data from the literature. The heat sinks produced by the SLM method have been shown to have superior performance to that of the conventional heat sinks. Although the angled elliptical fins transmit similar amounts of heat to the cylindrical pin fins across the range of air flow rates considered, they incur a lower pressure loss. The densely packed diamond array not only transfers 60% more heat than the cylindrical array, but does so with a lower pressure drop across it.