Heat Sink Fin Thickness

Calculate the thermal resistance and pressure drop of a plate fin heat sink and study how individual parameters affect the heat sink performance.

Heat sink fin thickness.

The distance between the fins. 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. Because optimum thickness aluminium heat sink fins are too soft and fragile. Fin thickness fin height fin length fin spacing base length base width and thickness of the base plate.

Heat sinks generally come in aspect ratios of 3 1 and 5 1. A heat sink s aspect ratio is the comparison between the fin height. Even though the thermal conduction is worse the toughness of steel allows thinner fins. The the width w of the heat sink spacing between the fins s and number of fins n will then be calculated for the selected values of l and h.

A simple plate fin heatsink has seven independent geometric parameters that can be varied in any design. 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 variation of the straight fin heat sink is a cross cut heat sink where the straight fin heat sink is cut at regular intervals. Notice that any old steel heat sink you see will have thinner fins than any new aluminium heat sink.

In computers heat sinks are used to cool cpus gpus and some chipsets and ram modules. The convection heat dissipation q c1 from area a 1 the external side surfaces of the heat sink shown figure 2 is first calculated.