Compact, lightweight, and highly efficient circular heat sink design for high-end PCs

With the demand for powerful computing performance features, the high-end desktop and industrial PC markets are expected to grow significantly despite the exploding use of mobile internet devices. At present active air cooling devices comprised of various finned heat sink, heat pipe, and fan combinations is popular. In addition to cooling, this combination meets the strict design constraints required for cost, noise, volume, and weight. To better meet these demands, in this paper, a new heat sink design is introduced based on the benefits of the circular heat sink of existing CPU cooling devices. The heat sink was proposed to be lightweight and have as a small volume as possible, while providing the same performance of existing CPU cooling devices. A simulation-driven design technique was used to investigate performance as well as the airflow and thermal behavior of the proposed heat sink. Corresponding physical performance testing was also conducted to validate the simulation results. The proposed heat sink was capable of dissipating a heat load of 130 W at temperatures of less than 85 degrees C under the low noise level of 23 dBA, which is similar to the cooling performance of the existing devices. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.