A brief review of phase change materials and CFD study of thermal management technique for electronic cooling using phase change material (PCM)

Abstract

In this project two different studies were performed, coupled with the review study a numerical study of (2D/3D) transient numerical simulation of a phase change material (PCM) based finned heat sink were performed to investigate the heat transfer performance for passive cooling of electronic devices. A 2D/3D computational domain of finned heat sinks of 2 mm and 3 mm fin thickness are employed with a constant fin volume fraction of 9%, acting as thermal conductivity enhancer (TCE). The n-eicosane is employed as a PCM inside the heat sink to store the heat generated from the electronic device applied at the heat sink base. Transient numerical simulations are performed using finite-volume-method and conjugate heat transfer and melting/solidification phenomenon are investigated by applying various power levels to both computational domain, while the main focused was given to 3D computational domain. The numerical results show that the employed PCM with low temperature keeps the heat sink base temperature in lower limits and uniform melting is observed inside the finned heat sink. With the increase of heating power level, the PCM melting time is decreased for fin thickness heat sinks. Hence, thermal performance of heat sink was significantly improved owing to the inclusion of rectangular fins and PCM.