Thermal Performance Evaluation of Friction Stir Welded Flat Plate Heat Sink Using CFD Analysis

Abstract

In an era of compact cooling requirements, where air cooling systems seem to be ineffective and consistently, being replaced by liquid cooled systems, with greater watt density heat energy dissipation. Such cooling systems must work with good quality enabling high efficiency. Hence, an attempt is made to fabricate an aluminum alloy based flat plate heat sink with cover and base plate using friction stir welding. The base plate is machined to obtain channels for fluid flow and the cover plate is fitted in the base plate and welded. Two such configurations of these heat sinks were fabricated with varying channel lengths and number of channels. The flow characteristics of the model for these configurations were analyzed numerically using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software tool, ANSYS fluent 14.