Conjugate Model of a Pin-Fin Heat Sink Using a Hybrid Conductance and CFD Model Within an Integrated Mcae Tool

Abstract

The application of an integrated design tool in thermal modeling of electronic packages is presented. The methodology is first applied to a heat sink as reported by Kamath [1]. The heat sink considered is pinned-finned with a rectangular cross section. Two flow cases are considered; impinging and parallel flow. The present study agrees very well with the reported data. In this study, however, only one-tenth the number of control volumes reported by Kamath [1] are utilized. The technique is then applied to model a pinned finned heat sink with circular cross section. There is very little difference in the amount of time required to set up this model (preprocessing) as compared with the rectangular cases. This is markedly different than finite control volume codes which need to employ a body-fitted-coordinate approach. The body-fitted-coordinate usually results in a much longer time for pre-processing. In addition, several codes are limited to rectangular geometry and cannot effectively model circular pins. Results for both parallel and impinging flow cases are presented for the circular pin-fm heat sink. The paper concludes with a suggestion for integrating detailed heat sink models at the component level with package and system level simulation.