Constructal Conjugate Heat Transfer in Three-Dimensional Cooling Channels

This paper reports on three-dimensional geometric optimization of heat sinks and cooling channels where the objective is to maximize the global thermal conductance (minimize the thermal resistance), subject to two global constraints: fixed total volume and fixed channel volume. Heat transferred from the base is enhanced by two mechanisms, forced convection in the channel and conduction in the heat sinks. Numerical results showing the effects of dimensionless pressure drop, ratio of solid/fluid thermal conductivity on the optimized structure are reported. A test case shows a reduction of about 8% in thermal resistance when this method was applied to a known micro-channel heat sink model.