A quick overview of compact air-cooled heat sinks applicable for electronic cooling—recent progress

This study provides an overview regarding enhancement of an air-cooled heat sink applicable for electronic cooling subject to cross-flow forced convection. Some novel designs and associated problems in air-cooled heat sinks are discussed, including the drawback of adding surfaces, utilization of porous surfaces such as metal foam or carbon foam, problems and suitable applicable range of highly interrupted surfaces (louver or slit) and longitudinal vortex generator. Though the metal foam may accommodate significant surface area, it is comparatively ineffective for air-cooling application due to its much lower fin efficiency, and this shortcoming can be improved by integrating with solid fin. For highly dense fin spacing (e.g., <1.0 mm), cannelure or grooved surface may be a better choice, and fin structure with periodic contraction and expansion may not be suitable for it introduces additional pressure drop penalty. The partial bypass concept, which manipulates a larger temperature difference at the trailing part of heat sink, can be implemented to significantly reduce the pressure drop. Through some certain niche operation, t the thermal resistance of the partial bypass heat sink may be superior to the conventional heat sink. The trapezoid fin surface featuring easier manufacturing and a smaller weight is shown to have competitive performance against traditional rectangular fin geometry. The IPFM (Interleaved Parallelogram Fin Module) design which combines two different geometrical fins with the odd number fins being rectangular shape, and parallelogram shape in even fin numbers, shows 8%–12% less surface than conventional design but still offers a lower thermal resistance than the conventional rectangular heat sink in lower flowrate operation. The cross-cut design shows appreciable improvements as compared to the conventional plate fin design especially in high velocity regime and the single cross-cut heat sinks are superior to multiple cross-cut heat sinks.