Influence of Changing Porosity and Height of Fins on Thermal Performance of The Metal Foam Heat Sink: Numerical Investigation

— With the major advances in technology, the extreme need for more powerful and efficient electronic devices and equipment has increased, that is requiring more heat generation as a result. So, it is necessary to find a cooling method commensurate with heat generated. This leads to the use of the foam heat sink which is considered as one of more powerful cooling methods for this purpose. The target of this work is to numerically investigate the impact of changing the porosity and the ratio between height of the fin respect to its length on base temperature and heat transfer coefficient in the case of natural convection conditions. The dimensions of the foam fins were 100 * 10 in mm (length * width) and the spacing between fins was 8 mm, while the height of fins was variable with ratio ranging from 0.2 to 2.4. The porosity of model was changing from 0.95 to 0.71 with fixed pore density of 10 PPI. The investigations have been performed by using ANSYS Fluent software (R16.1) and the model of a local thermal non-equilibrium (LINE) has been used in the analysis where, the temperature of the solid part in foam matrix and the fluid are solved individually in energy equation. The heat fluxes were various from 4 to 30 W, and air has been used as a working fluid. The results showed that the average improvement in base temperature of the heat sink is 16.7 %, and the maximum enhancement of heat transfer coefficient reaches about 21.3%, when the porosity reduced from 0.95 to 0.79. The highest enhancement in base temperature and heat transfer coefficient obtains when the height to length ratio is (2.2) and estimated by 30 % and 83.8% respectively, compared with the ratio of (0.2).