Metal foam heat sinks for laptop cooling application in a heat pipe-heat sink arrangement

摘要

The purpose of this study was to determine the viability of metal foam heat sinks for thermal management of laptop computers through numerical modeling, experiments and analysis. FLOTHERM was used as the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool for numerical modeling. The focus was situations where heat is transferred away from the heat source by a heat pipe and dissipated remotely. Two cooling schemes, which differ in the type of fan-heat sink combination at the remote location, were employed. One is a duct-covered fan and heat sink and the other, a fan-sink, with a fan mounted directly on top of the heat sink. Experiments were conducted in a temperature-controlled wind tunnel to simulate a hot laptop enclosure. Results show that the proposed schemes are capable of dissipating 9-12W in forced convection, with significant advantage in weight over conventional cooling schemes. Tube bundle theory and FLOTHERM simulations were used to determine the pressure drop characteristic of heat sinks. The fan operating point was determined for each configuration. The study demonstrates that high performance, low-weight and reliable thermal management schemes can be developed using metal foam heat sinks.