Numerical Study of Thermal and Hydraulic Performance of Compound Heat Sink

Abstract

The present study demonstrates the numerical simulation of the compound heat sink and provides physical insight into the flow and heat transfer characteristics. The governing equations are discretized by using a control-volume-based finite-difference method with a power-law scheme on an orthogonal nonuniform staggered grid. The coupling of the velocity and the pressure terms of momentum equations are solved by the SIMPLEC algorithm. The well-known RNG k − ε two-equations turbulence model is employed to describe the turbulent structure and behavior. The compound heat sink is composed of a plate fin heat sink and some pins between plate fins. The objective of this investigation is to examine the effects of the types and the arrangements of the pins. It is found that the compound heat sink has better synthetical performance than the plate fin heat sink. Moreover, the compound heat sink which is composed of a plate fin heat sink and circular pins performs better than the square ones.

The support of the National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan under contract No. NSC 96-2221-E-006-161-MY2 is gratefully acknowledged. The authors also want to thank the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) for computer time and facilities.