Optimal placement and sizing of heat sink attachments on a heat-generating piece for minimization of peak temperature

The lifespan of many components depends on their operating temperature. Heat sinks are used to extract heat from heat dissipating devices to avoid overheating and mechanical-electrical loss. Therefore, it is critical to optimally distribute the heat sink attachments to reach the minimum excess (peak) temperature. This paper documents the optimal location of heat sinks mounted on a heat-generating (electronic) piece. The optimization objective is to minimize the peak temperature when the total surface area of the attachments is fixed. Heat sink attachments are distributed on the top surface of the hot piece in several uniform and non-uniform arrangements. For each number of heat sources, the results show that there exists an optimal arrangement which thermally performs the best. In the case of two and three heat sinks, the optimal distributions are columnar and the triangular arrangements, respectively. The increase in the number of the heat sinks results in thermal performance improvement. The highest temperature of double heat sinks configuration is about 28% lower in comparison with the single heat sink. It is also indicated the thermal performance of the elongated shape is higher compared to the circular shape.