A CFD-based experimental analysis on the effect of free stream cooling on the performance of micro processor heat sinks

Heat sinks are widely used to remove the heat from the microelectronic devices including Pentium and AMD processors. In the present study, four different types of heat sink have been used i.e. Pentiums III and IV, AMD Athlon and Duron heat sinks; in order to analyze their performance. The paper presents the comparison of heat sinks of Pentium and AMD families. The simulation and experimental investigations have been made at different Reynolds numbers. The Fluent 6.2 software which is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code has been used in the simulation to predict the temperature and the flow fields. The experiments have been carried out by using an air chamber with nozzle at different Reynolds numbers. The Nusselt number and temperature distributions have been plotted against Reynolds number for all heat sinks. The simulation results obtained are found in satisfactory agreement with the experimental results.