A Suggestion on Heat Sink Simplification on Natural Convection Available to Purchase

Heat sink is commonly found in electronic systems. For its optimization, numerical computation is introduced. However, narrow gaps between the fins of heat sink have been a troubling factor. That increases the number of grid excessively, and results in increased computation time. The quality of grid can be poor and that halt the accuracy of computed numerical solution. To avoid these problems, many simplification methods are proposed by simplifying complex heat sink. The most popular example is regarding the array of fins as flow resistance from hydraulic point of view and working fluid with different thermal conductivity for thermal equivalence [1]. Its thermal conductivity can be determined according to well-known relationship between Nu, Re, and Pr (see [2, 3]). This simplification presents many advantages but it is not applicable to natural convection. In this paper, a modified model is suggested to extend the simplification to natural convection, which is still popularly applied to electro cooling systems. With the results of [4], thermal conductivity of flow resistance region is iteratively. The modified model is verified by computing flow and thermal fields of PDP. Applying this model to fanless PDP, the number of total grid is reduced by 38.5% percents and corresponding computation time was saved while the accuracy of computed solution is kept undamaged.