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Abstract

The feasibility and effectiveness of air impingement cooling on pin-fin heat sinks applied in personal computers (PC) were investigated numerically in this study. The effects of fin height, fin width, base plate thickness of the heat sink, and ratio of the vertical spacing between the nozzle and the heat sink to jet diameter (z/D) were discussed in detail. For a PC with a P4, 2.8 GHz, 68.4 W CPU, it was found that the cooling effect by using air impingement on a heat sink with z/D = 4 and fin width 4.13 mm for the jet Reynolds number (Re) between 20000 to 25000 is comparable with the cooling effect achieved by using traditional coolers. When the fin width was increased to 5.3 mm, the performance by jet impingement was improved significantly. Specifically, the cooling performance by jet impingement for Re = 15000 and fin width 5.3 mm surpasses that by using fan-heat sink coolers. Moreover, by changing the design of the PC chassis, we were able to increase the fin height and z/D from 32.75 mm to 38.05 mm and from 4 to 8, respectively. It was found that the cooling effect was further enhanced. When handling CPU’s with higher power (> 80 W), jet impingement cooling along with proper heat sink design and PC chassis design offers another possible choice.

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