Cladded Porous Material Integrated Pin Fin Heat Sink Performance Evaluation

As electronics and informatics technology progress, there is an increasing need for more efficient cooling methods in electronics. Open-cell metal foams provide a unique solution by combining the strength of metals with the benefits of foams, such as being lightweight and offering a high heat transfer surface area. While metallic foams provide a large surface area for heat transfer, filling heatsinks with these materials leads to undesirable high pressure drops, causing a considerable decrease in hydrothermal efficiency. Having cladded porous foams around pin fins is a solution to increase the heat sink hydrothermal performance. On the other hand, having porous foams around the whole perimeter increases the air-solid contact area in the wake region after the separation point, resulting in unnecessary foam usage and extra pressure drop. This study introduces a novel design featuring cladded aluminum foams placed on the frontal half of the pin fin of a heatsink. Both experimental and numerical investigations are conducted to evaluate the hydrothermal performance of this design. Hydrothermal performances of fully and partially foam cladded heat sinks are compared under different cooling air velocities and partially foam cladded heat sinks has very close performance evaluation criteria to full cladding utilizing 50% less porous material.