VAT Based Modeling of Plate-Pin Fin Heat Sink and Obtaining Closure From CFD Solution

A plate-pin fin heat sink (PPFHS) is composed of a plate fin heat sink (PFHS) and some pin fins planted between the flow channels. Just as the other kinds of heat sinks, it is a hierarchical multilevel device with many parameters required for its description. Volume Averaging Theory (VAT) is used to rigorously cast the point-wise conservation of energy, momentum and mass equations into a form that represents the thermal and hydraulic properties of the plate-pin fin (porous media) morphology and to describe the hierarchical nature of the heat sink. Closure for the upper level is obtained using VAT to describe the lower level. At the lower level, the media is described by a representative elementary volume (REV). Closure terms in the VAT equations are related to a local friction factor and a heat transfer coefficient of the REV. The terms in the closure expressions are complex and relating experimental data to the closure terms resulting from VAT is difficult. In this work, we model the plate-pin fin heat sink based on Volume Averaging Theory and use CFD to obtain detailed solutions of flow through an element of PPFHS and use these results to evaluate the closure terms needed for a fast running VAT based code. The VAT based code can then be used to solve the heat transfer characteristics of the higher level heat sink. The objective is to show how plate-pin fin heat sinks can be modeled as porous media based on Volume Averaging Theory and how CFD can be used in place of a detailed, often formidable, experimental effort.