Numerical simulation of turbulent heat transfer from perforated plate-fin heat sinks

Excessive heat from microelectronic components is essential to remove to increase the reliability of the system. In this paper, various types of perforations in the form of small channels such as square, circular, triangular and hexagonal cross sections are introduced and thermal performances are compared to improve the cooling performance of heat sink. The governing equations are solved by adopting a control volume based finite element method with an unstructured non-uniform grid system. Flow and heat transfer characteristics are presented for Reynolds numbers from 2 x 10(4) to 4 x 10(4) based on the fin length and Prandtl number is taken as Pr = 0.71. RANS based k-epsilon turbulence model is used to predict the turbulent flow parameters. The predicted results are validated by the previously published experimental data and in reasonable agreement with the experiment. Results show that fins having circular perforations have better thermal and fluid dynamic performances than the other types of fins considered here.