Heat Development and Comparison Between the Steady and Pulsating Flows Through Aluminum Foam Heat Sink

Continuous improvements in electronic devices for high-performance computers have led to a need for new and more effective methods of chip cooling. The first purpose of this study was to investigate the heat transfer development and characteristics of aluminum foam heat sink subjected to steady water flow for electronics cooling (Intel core i7 processor). The second purpose was to implement a new type of water flow through the aluminum foam, which is pulsating or oscillating flow in order to achieve more uniform temperature distribution over the electronic surfaces. The aluminum foam heat sink was subjected to a water flow covering the non-Darcy laminar flow regime (297–1353 Reynolds numbers). The bottom side of the heat sink was heated with a heat flux between 8.5 and 13.8 W/cm². The pulsating flow frequency was ranged from 0.04 to 0.1 Hz. In addition, in order to complement the experimental studies, a numerical model was developed using finite element method and compared with the experimental data. The results revealed that the thermal entry length of the fluid flow through metal foam (porous media) is much smaller than that for laminar internal flow through empty channel. The result also showed that the local surface temperature increases along with increasing the axial flow direction for steady water flow case. On the other hand, for pulsating flow, the local temperature distributions act as a convex profile with the maximum surface temperature at the center of the test section. In addition, it was observed that the pulsating water flow through the aluminum foam heat sink achieves enhancement by 14% in the average Nusselt number and by 73% in temperature uniformity over the surface compared with steady water flow case.