In this study, the thermal management system of a notebook computer is investigated by using a commercial finite volume Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. After taking the computer apart, all dimensions are measured and all major components are modeled as accurately as possible. Heat dissipation values and necessary characteristics of the components are obtained from the manufacturer&#039 / s specifications. The different heat dissipation paths that are utilized in the design are investigated. Two active fans and aluminum heat dissipation plates as well as the heat pipe system are modeled according to their specifications. The first and second order discretization schemes as well as two different mesh densities are investigated as modeling choices. Under different operating powers, adequacy of the existing thermal management system is observed. Average and maximum temperatures of the internal components are reported in the form of tables. Thermal resistance networks for five different operating conditions are obtained from the analysis of the CFD simulation results. Temperature distributions on the top surface of the chassis where the keyboard and touchpad are located are investigated considering the user comfort.

A novel complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible microchannel heat sink is designed, fabricated, and tested for electronic cooling applications. The proposed microchannel heat sink requires no design change of the electronic circuitry underneath. Therefore, microchannels can be fabricated on top of the finished CMOS wafers by just adding a few more steps to the fabrication flow. Combining polymer (parylene C) and metal (copper) structures, a high performance microchannel heat sink can be easily manufactured on top of the electronic circuits, forming a monolithic cooling system. In the design stage, computer simulations of the microchannels with several different dimensions have been performed. Microchannels made of only parylene showed poor heat transfer performance as expected since the thermal conductivity of parylene C is very low. Therefore an alternative design comprising structural parylene layer and embedded metal layers has been modeled. Copper is selected as the metal due to its simple fabrication and very good thermal properties. The results showed that the higher the copper surface area the better the thermal performance of the heat sinks. Based on the modeling results, the final test structures are designed with full copper sidewalls with a parylene top wall. Several different microchannel test chips have been fabricated in METU-MEMS Research &amp / Application Center cleanroom facilities. The devices are tested with different flow rates and heat loads. During the tests, it was shown that the test devices can remove about 126 W/cm2 heat flux from the chip surface while keeping the chip temperature at around 90&deg / C with a coolant flow rate of 500 &mu / l/min per channel.

In this study, forced cooling of heat sinks mounted on CPU&rsquo / s was investigated. Heat sink effectiveness, effect of turbulence models, effect of radiation heat transfer and different heat sink geometries were numerically analyzed by commercially available computational fluid dynamics softwares Icepak and Fluent. The numerical results were compared with the experimental data and they were in good agreement. Conjugate heat transfer is simulated for all the electronic cards and packages by solving Navier-Stokes equations. Grid independent, well converged and well posed models were run and the results were compared. The best heat sink geometry is selected and it is modified in order to have lower maximum temperature distribution in the heat sink.