Article ID: 17-50HE_OA
Metal 3D printing(additive manufacturing) has shown promise as a method of fabricating high-performance heat sinks, owing to its ability to produce optimized structures of any design. In this study, computational fluid dynamics was initially performed to investigate the heat transfer performance of heat sinks with lattice structures. The heat sinks were then fabricated using 3D printing, and their actual heat transfer performance was compared with the findings from the numerical computational fluid dynamics. Additionally, X-ray CT scanning was used to measure the three-dimensional shape and surface area of the fabricated objects, and computational fluid dynamics accounting for inherent surface roughness of 3D printed objects was performed on the 3D shapes derived from these measurements. This analysis revealed that lattice structural heat sinks have a more effective heat transfer coefficient than finned heat sinks. Further, while the surface area of the fabricated structures was greater than the design values owing to the roughness in the surface profile, it was evident that this surface roughness degraded the heat transfer performance.
