Research On The Thermal Performance Of Electronic Cooling System Using Phase Change Material (pcm)-based Heat Sinks

Thermal management is recognized as one of the most significant bottlenecks in the development of advanced microprocessors for electronic devices, so a lot of researchers have focused on it and many results were presented. The cooling system using phase change material is one of thermal managements, which is another promising method because of its compact structure, reliable performance and low price. The present study explores numerically the process of phase changing in the cooling system with Fluent6.3. The literatures indicate that modeling of phase-change processes presents a significant challenge, due to complexity and conjunction of the involved physical phenomena, so various approaches are attempted to overcome these difficulties, commonly by neglecting one or more essential features of the process, such as, volumetric expansion due to the phase change, convection in the liquid phase, and motion of the solid in the melt due to density differences. And those limitations result in great errors with the experimental results. The present research is an attempt to overcome those limitations, and solve complete conservation equations simultaneously for solid fins, solid and liquid PCM, and air, while allowing for PCM expansion and Shrinkage, convection in the fluid media (melted PCM and air), and solid phase motion in the liquid. In this paper, a series of parameters was chosen for detailed investigation, the results of the parametric study are discussed and analyzed for the purpose of optimized design of such system. The process and content are as follows:1) The PCMs for the thermal controlling are summarized and the principles of numerically method are presented. Experimental, numerical research methods are also summed up.2) The numerical method get testified with the experimental results in the literature. And the mesh effect also been taken to check the resluts difference between the mesh partitions.3) The physical model of the cooling system has been studied and simplified. The Mathematical model of the system is developed using the enthalpy method. Numerical simulations are carried out to study the effects of fin, the effect of natural- convection, the effect of the surrounding temperature and the effect of the properties of PCM.4) The further research about the geometrical parameters is taken out to study the effect of fin height, the effect of fin interval, the effect of fin thickness, and the effect of different PCM filling amount. And then Dimensional analysis is applied in search of generalized results.