Summary of - Experimental Investigations on Heat Transfer Enhancement in an Electronic Device

Background: For any electronic equipment to be reliable, the heat produced during the equipmentoperation should be released to the atmosphere and it must be kept within its critical temperature limit. Otherwise, the equipment may not function efficiently and become damaged early. From several years, phase change materials (PCMs) have been used in several thermal energy storage applications, including the cooling of electronic equipment. PCMs use their latent heat of fusion to extract thermal energy from the heated electronic equipment and release the same to the atmosphere. Research Goal: To keep the electronic device temperature below the threshold level..Methodological Approach: Experimental studies were carried out to cool the electronic device. A plate heater mimics the heat source. The following methodology was adopted.i. An Aluminium heat sink was placed on the plate heater of 80 W capacity. ii. The phase change material, Sodium Acetate Trihydrate was used to extract the heat from the heat sink.iii. Horizontal and vertical fins were used to enhance the heat transfer rate from the phase change material.iv. The experiments were carried out considering four different cases, viz., (a) without fins and without PCM (b) with fins and without PCM (c) without fins and with PCM and (d) with fins and with PCM.v. The temperature, current and voltage were measured during the experiments. vi. Experiments were carried out at different power input settings of 12, 16, 20 and 24 W.vii. The experimental data was analysed and the results were plotted.Results and Discoveries:1. The heat sink with passive cooling technique, that is, with phase change material and fins resulted in the best cooling performance in terms of time required to reach the PCM at 60 °C2. With increase in power setting, the time required to cool the electronic device was reduced. The lowest time of 35 minutes was observed for 24 W.3. The fins were successful in improving the heat transfer rate of the PCMCitation to the base paper:Dhake, G., Borse, R., Bhosale, M., Andhare, Y. and Salunkhe, P.B., “Experimental investigations on heat transfer enhancement in an electronic device”, International Journal of Energy, Environment, and Economics, 2023, 29 pp. 513-522. Publication DateJune 3, 2023