Heat Transfer Capacity of Lotus-type Porous Copper Heat Sink for Air Cooling

Lotus-type porous metal with many straight pores is attractive as a heat sink because larger heat transfer capacity is obtained due to the small diameter of the pores. The heat transfer capacity of the lotus-type porous copper heat sink was calculated using the model with the pores of uniform diameters. However, actual lotus-type porous metals have a distribution of pore diameter. In the present work, we investigated the lotus-type porous copper fin model (non-uniform pore model) by considering size distribution of measured on the actual measurement of the pore diameters on a cross-section of the lotus-type porous copper fin. Prediction of the heat transfer characteristics for the lotus-type porous copper heat sink shows a good agreement with the experimental data. In addition, the predicted heat transfer coefficient of non-uniform pore model also shows a good agreement with the uniform pore models. Thus, it is clarified that the heat transfer characteristic of the lotus-type porous copper heat sink can be predicted by the uniform pore model.