Heat Sink Fin Thickness

In the case presented in table 2 the total thermal resistance shows a decrease of about 15 after allowing the fin thickness to vary in the direction normal to the fluid flow.

Heat sink fin thickness.

Aluminium heat sinks are always made with the fins too thick. Notice that any old steel heat sink you see will have thinner fins than any new aluminium heat sink. A simple plate fin heatsink has seven independent geometric parameters that can be varied in any design. Because optimum thickness aluminium heat sink fins are too soft and fragile.

The convection heat dissipation q c1 from area a 1 the external side surfaces of the heat sink shown figure 2 is first calculated. Fin thickness fin height fin length fin spacing base length base width and thickness of the base plate. In computers heat sinks are used to cool cpus gpus and some chipsets and ram modules. Even though the thermal conduction is worse the toughness of steel allows thinner fins.

Finally the total resistance of the optimized variable thickness fin heat sink is lower than that of the optimized uniform thickness fin heat sink. A heat sink also commonly spelled heatsink is a passive heat exchanger that transfers the heat generated by an electronic or a mechanical device to a fluid medium often air or a liquid coolant where it is dissipated away from the device thereby allowing regulation of the device s temperature. A variation of the straight fin heat sink is a cross cut heat sink where the straight fin heat sink is cut at regular intervals. A heat sink s aspect ratio is the comparison between the fin height.

A heat sink with high aspect ratio will have either a greater density of fins in a specific footprint tall fins compared to heat sinks with less aspect ratio. Heat sinks generally come in aspect ratios of 3 1 and 5 1.