Heat sink numerical simulation with ICEPAK using compact heat sink modeling techniques

Active and passive heat sinks of any shape and kind are essential for the proper thermal management of electronics and telecommunication equipment. Heat sink thermal characteristics and behavior information is of paramount importance for board and product designer of thermal management systems. Therefore, the numerical modeling of heat sinks using CFD software packages is commonly used by today's engineers. However, as the systems to be modeled become more complex, the complete modeling of each heat sink in a system is not possible due to computational and computer memory limits. One way to overcome this is the development of compact heat sink modeling using simplified, but physically based, models to reduce the number of gridpoints or elements needed. This paper presents these efforts with the CFD package ICEPAK. ICEPAK is a finite element CFD software package used extensively in the thermal analysis and design of electronics systems. The goal of the study is to validate the compact heat sink models with actual heat sink behavior (both experimental and numerical). The study will include thermal resistance and other flow data for various hear sinks under natural and forced convection cooling. Results indicate that there is very good correlation between the compact heat sink modeling and actual heat sink behavior.