Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2020) 135: 432
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00359-y

Regular Article

Numerical analysis of micro-pin-fin heat sink cooling in the mainboard chip of a CPU

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Pilani Campus, Vidya Vihar, Rajasthan, 333 031, India
² Department of Physics, College of Sciences, King Faisal University, PO Box 380, Alahsa, 31982, Saudi Arabia
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, MCKV Institute of Engineering, Howrah, West Bengal, 711204, India
⁴ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Sudhir Chandra Sur Degree Engineering College, Kolkata, India
⁵ Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Ghent University, 9000, Gent, Belgium
⁶ Division of Computational Physics, Institute for Computational Science, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
⁷ Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

^* e-mail: nguyenminhhoang1@tdtu.edu.vn

Received: 4 October 2019
Accepted: 22 March 2020
Published online: 25 May 2020

Abstract

The cooling capability of heat sinks is important for a central processing unit (CPU). In this work, simulation has been done to investigate heat transfer (HT) in a heat sink (HS) mounted on the circular cylinder chip of a CPU that is studied and to explore the thermofluid behavior of the designed micro-pin-fin heat sink (MPFHS). Air cooling methods are used for heat extraction. This numerical work considers the effects of inlet turbulence intensity (TI) and fin diameter (D) of the micro-pin-fin on the performance of the HS. Turbulent SST model is used to explore turbulence regime in the system. The HT and pressure coefficient were obtained at different Reynolds number (Re) (i.e., different inlet velocities). As shown in this study, the Nusselt number (Nu) rises with the increase in air flow velocity which enhances the heat extraction from CPU.