Experimental study of phase change material (PCM) based spiral heat sink for the cooling process of electronic equipment

Abstract

Today, every device that a person uses depends on electronic equipment, frequent and long-term use of it causes to heat up and as a result, slow down the speed and performance of that device. In more important and sensitive equipment such as medical equipment, slow speed and reduced performance cause irreparable damage. Therefore, to cool these devices, their internal electronic equipment must be cooled. In studies by others, the simultaneous use of several phase change materials and airflow in the form of layer-by-layer contact was usually less studied. In this study, using CNC machining, a heatsink consisting of 2 spirals was produced. In the first spiral, PCM Paraffin Wax with different volume percentages and in the second spiral, the presence or absence of forced airflow in heat transfer rate 2.9 W to 3.7 W was tested with a step of 0.4 W and the results were that by adding %50 PCM and adding 100 % PCM to the system, its performance increases by 7.19 % and 44.91 %, respectively, which shows using the maximum volume capacity of PCM increases efficiency. Also, by adding forced airflow to the system, its performance has increased by 7.71 %. It can be said that if the forced airflow in the system is used layer by layer, it prevents the heat from concentrating in certain parts of the heatsink and the circuit, which results in the same heating of the whole system and the heat is evenly distributed throughout the heatsink.