Articles techniques et présentations

This paper presents numerical investigation of electronic thermal control using heat sink for integrated circuit (IC) chip cooling under forced convection in a horizontal channel. Steady state, three dimensional, incompressible, laminar forced convection cooling of chip attached with heat sink is modeled and simulated using COMSOL Multiphysics^®  4.3b commercial software. Heat transfer module is considered with Heat transfer in Solids (heat sink and chip) and conjugate heat transfer for studying the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics. Heat sink is composed of base and fins attach to it made of aluminium having thermal conductivity 160 W/m². Integrated circuit chip that is used on the motherboard of electronic equipment is made of silica gel material. The details of the sizes and the materials used in the present study is given in Table 1. Heat transfer from the solids i.e. heat sink and the chip is shown in Fig. 1. It indicates that the maximum temperature obtained was 99.7 °C for the heat input of 10 W and heat transfer coefficient of 5 W/m² K. Fig. 2. shows isothermal contours on IC chip. Fig. 3 shows the conjugate heat transfer in horizontal channel to study the heat transfer characteristics for electronic thermal control. It is observed that in conjugate heat transfer mode the maximum temperature obtained was 33°C. It indicates that the heat transfer rate is quite high in conjugate heat transfer made. This problem is useful for electronics and IT industry for cooling of electronic components.