Fork-shaped highly conductive pathways for maximum cooling in a heat generating piece

• New types of high conductivity pathways with fork shape are introduced.
• Fork-shaped inserts are compared with pathways mentioned in the literature.
• Fork-shaped inserts are found superior to pathways mentioned in the literature.

In engineering practice, the space occupied by high conductivity materials together with the cost are the two elements of major concern. Therefore, seeking for more efficient designs of high conductivity pathways (‘inserts’), embedded into a heat generating body constitutes a formidable challenge. The main idea of this paper is to introduce new patterns for the highly conductive pathways, called ‘fork-shaped’ configurations. Essentially, two types of fork-shaped pathways, ‘F1’ and ‘F2’ are introduced. Numerical results demonstrate that, these two configurations of highly conductive pathways, remarkably surpass the latest configurations reported in the literature, with the same amount of high conductivity materials. It is further confirmed that the ‘peak’ temperature can be reduced by 41% and 46% by using fork-shaped pathways of ‘F1’ type, and ‘F2’ type, respectively, when compared with the base X-shaped inserts. To highlight the discovery found in this paper, it is proved that if only about one third of the high conductivity material used for an X-shaped insert are used for the fork-shaped insert, the heat generating body operates at the same level of peak temperature associated with the new configurations.