Thermal/fluid performance evaluation of serrated plate fin heat sinks

Abstract

Cooling of the electronics in people movers and other rail transportation systems require the removal of high power dissipation from the electronic equipment to ensure their long term reliability and performance. In this study, the thermal performance of in-service serrated plate fin heat sink is evaluated for a range of Reynolds number by means of fully three-dimensional numerical simulations of the air flow over the heat sink. The flow is considered to be turbulent and both hydrodynamically and thermally developing. Our computations yield local and global heat transfer and flow parameters such as temperature distribution in the fin, heat transfer coefficient, Nusselt number, pressure drop, and the maximum temperature of the heat sink. The results point to the directions for optimizing the heat sink performance. Hence, variations of design parameters around the existing configurations are investigated. These parameters are fin interruption and staggering, fin height, serration spacing, fin thickness and inter-fin spacing, fin base thickness, and clearance gap between the fin tips and the upper wall of the channel that encloses the heat sink. The computations yield the optimal designs of plate fin heat sinks for transportation applications.