Experimental investigation on paraffin wax integrated with copper foam based heat sinks for electronic components thermal cooling

Owing to enormously high surface area and high thermal conductivity, copper foam based heat sinks for electronic cooling are investigated in this paper. Copper foam1 with porosity 0.95 and pore density 15 pores per inch and copper foam2 with 0.97 porosity and pore density 35 pores per inch are used to investigate the performance of heat sinks filled with phase change material (PCM). Various configurations of heat sink with PCM volume fractions 0.0, 0.6, 0.7 and 0.8 are investigated under heat load of 8–24 W to figure out the optimum performance of the heat sink. Experimental results revealed that base temperature of the heat sink is reduced as the volume fraction of PCM is increased. Anyhow, discharging process is not affected significantly. Furthermore, copper foam1 (0.95 porosity) exhibited better heat transfer both in charging and discharging as compared to that of copper foam2 (0.97 porosity). Maximum temperature reduction of 9.81% was found for copper foam1/PCM at 8 W and PCM volume fraction of 0.8 when it is compared with copper foam2/PCM composite. For the same porosity, maximum reduction in base temperature was observed for 0.8 volume fraction of PCM at 16 W heat input. Finally, it is concluded that copper foam1/PCM composite impregnated with 0.8 volume fraction is an optimized configuration of heat sink.