Horizontal sinusoidal wavy form plate fin heat sinks for natural convection heat dissipation

The plate-fin heat sink geometry was modified to have the fin form sinusoidal wave shape in the horizontal direction with twelve variations by amplitude and period changes. Three different wave periods and four different wave amplitudes were used. The purpose was to alter natural convection motion in favor of heat transfer effectiveness. The main performance indicator was the base-plate average temperature. The independent geometric parameters were experimentally examined in terms of the effectiveness of natural convection heat transfer by the measured average temperature values. Heat transfer by radiation was calculated by an analytical algebraic approach in order to obtain the Nusselt number solely based on convective heat transfer. Eight different heat inputs were used for each tested geometry to change the Grashof and Rayleigh numbers in a laminar flow interval. As reference geometries, a flat plate and a heat sink with straight/flat-plate fins were utilized. The heat sinks were also oriented to three different angles by a test stand. Accordingly, thirty six unique experimental cases were examined as a result of 327 trials and 1100 hours of testing. It was realized that the wavy fin geometry enhances natural convection heat transfer compared to the base-plate and flat-plate-fin heat sinks. However, increasing period and amplitude of the wave form more than initial values deteriorated the gains by the modifications on the fins. Since a single-period, 2-mm-amplitude heat sink resulted in the highest Nusselt number for all orientations, an optimum may be sought about this setting. As a general evaluation, computational simulations for spatial resolution of the event physics and dimensional optimization are standing as future study targets.