Analysis of the cooling performance of pin-type heat sinks: identification of the optimal nanofluid and design configuration
摘要
The high processing power of electronic devices contributes to overheating, which is a major problem in today's society. This study evaluates the geometry of pin-type heat sinks—among the most effective solutions for electronic cooling—and the cooling performance of different working fluids. Nine geometries were generated by varying pin diameter (0.3–0.9 mm) and inter-pin spacing (1–2 mm). Each geometry was tested with three fluids, yielding 27 distinct heat sink–fluid configurations. The fluid types used in the study are water, mono (CuO/water), and hybrid (CuO + Fe/water) nanofluids with 2% concentration. The research was carried out using computational fluid dynamics. In addition, the data obtained from computational fluid dynamics were used in the response surface methodology to generate the equations that provide the optimal cooling solutions. According to the results, for all three fluid types, the geometry type with the smallest pin diameter and the largest pin spacing exhibited the highest thermal resistance, while the geometry type with the largest pin diameter and the smallest pin spacing provided the lowest thermal resistance. The lowest thermal resistance was 0.288 K W−1 in mono-nanofluid, the highest performance evaluation factor was 0.9542 in hybrid nanofluid, the most efficient temperature distribution was 308.64–312.25 K in mono-nanofluid, and the lowest R2 value was 0.9789. Such a high R2 value is an important indicator of how well the data obtained from the parameters used are compatible with the analysis.