About the performance of a single porous cooling fin

Abstract

In this master thesis, an experimental study has been performed to explore if the temperature profile along a porous fin can be predicted by the existing analytical solution for solid cooling fins. The experiments performed during this thesis show that the temperature profile can indeed be represented by the existing solid-fin model. However, a correction for the existing model for the effective conductivity of a porous material is needed. The measurements were taken under a natural convection regime. The literature study revealed that very little experimental research has been done on porous cooling fins. The studies that were published, focus on the total heat removal of an entire heat sink, not just a single fin. These studies ignore the three-dimensional structure of the fin itself, which makes the results often case-specific and difficult to compare with each other. This method does not provide a way of predicting a fin's performance beforehand. The experiments indicate that the effective conductivity of a porous material will stay a material property, as is the case for solid material. The correction that is needed for existing model looks to be a strong function of porosity, but a very weak function of pore size and fin orientation. The porous samples outperformed the solid one in both heat removal and fin base temperature, which is in agreement with existing literature. The result from thesis can be used to design a setup in which the effective heat transfer coefficient and conductivity can be determined in a much simpler way. This enables for collecting more data and create empirical correlations for these two parameters, which predict fin performance.