Body-centered Cubic Forced Air Heat Sink for Additive Manufacturing
With the advent of metal additive manufacturing methods, increasingly complex designs which were previously not feasible to manufacture can now be realized. Intricate heat-sinks can be designed and manufactured which challenge the multi-faceted problems of convective cooling. A novel heat sink (HS) design was developed by the ME 5B3 class at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, to take advantage AM capability for heat sink design. The design form aims to mimic nature, with a Body-Centred Cubic (BCC) pattern of nodes and links in a lattice configuration to provide a high surface area to volume ratio. Uniform heat distribution is drastically improved by nature-inspired tree-like thermal vias positioned within the lattice, with a flow diverter strategically placed to improve flow distribution within the heat sink. Numerical analyses confirmed the improvement in the flow distribution and temperature uniformity, contributing to a significant enhancement in heat transfer. The final BCC structure was optimized using an iterative process with CFD. The Figure of Merit (FOM) for the proposed design was estimated to be FOM=1.3×10-4, significantly outperforming an off-the-shelf extruded heat sink