Heat Transfer Characterization of 3D Printable Architected Heat Sinks

Abstract The current developments in additive manufacturing (3D printing) overcome the limitations of traditional fabrication techniques such as milling, drilling and casting and allow to fabricate geometrically-complex heat sinks for which the topological features are capitalized upon to enhance the thermal performance. In this work, we propose new and novel 3D printable architected heat sinks with geometrically complex structures based on triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS). Their printability with laser-based metal additive manufacturing is assessed using electron microscopy techniques. Moreover, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling is used to assess the effect of geometry on the performance of the proposed TPMS-based heat sinks in active cooling using forced convection heat transfer environment. The convection heat transfer coefficient, surface temperature, pressure drop are predicted using CFD method. The results showed that the heat transfer performance does not depend on the architects porosity alone, but also depends on the heat sink solid-networks structure.