Annals of the Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conference 13

ISBN 1-56700-225-0 / CD 1-56700-226-9

Year 2006

T. Bello-Ochende
Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa

Leon Liebenberg
Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa

Arnaud G. Malan
Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, Rep. of South Africa

Adrian Bejan
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0300, USA

Josua Meyer
University of Pretoria

This paper reports on the geometric optimization of a heat-sink cooling channel where the objective is to maximize the global thermal conductance of the heat-sink and the coolant channel, subject to two global constraints: fixed total volume and solid material (heat-sink). This is a conjugate problem with conduction in the solid and forced convective flow in the cooling channel. The geometric optimization was carried out at three levels: (i) the internal structure which represents the relative thickness of the solid substrate, the vertical thickness and the base, and the external structure which accounts for (ii) the rectangular cross-section, and (iii) the axial flow length of the heat sink. Numerical results show that optimized flow length and global thermal conductance increase with increase in the dimensionless pressure drop number, similarly the global thermal conductance increases as the volume fraction for the conducting solid increases. The optimized longitudinal length decreases with increase in the solid volume fraction and dimensionless thermal conductivity. The available volume is distributed optimally through the system so that the global thermal conductance is maximized.

HTE-02 pages DOI: 10.1615/IHTC13.p17.20 Download article

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