Investigation of heat transfer characteristics in plate-fin heat sink

The present study applies the inverse method in conjunction with the experimental temperature data to investigate the accuracy of the heat transfer coefficient on the fin in the plate-fin heat sink for various fin spacings. The commercial software is applied to solve the governing differential equations with the RNG k-epsilon model in order to obtain the heat transfer and fluid flow characteristics. Under the assumption of the non-uniform heat transfer coefficient, the entire fin is divided into several sub-fin regions before performing the inverse scheme. The average heat transfer coefficient in each sub-fin region is assumed to be unknown. Later, the present inverse scheme in conjunction with the experimental temperature data is applied to determine the heat transfer coefficient and fin efficiency. In order to determine a more reliable heat transfer coefficient, a comparison between the present inverse and numerical results and those obtained from the existing correlations will be made. The numerical fin temperatures will also be compared with the experimental data. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.