Numerical and experimental studies on an optimum Fin design problem to determine the deformed wavy-shaped heat sinks

A three-dimensional wavy-shaped fin array design problem is considered in this study using a software package CFD-ACE+ and the Levenberg-Marquardt method (LMM). The wavy shape of fin is expressed as a deformed sinusoidal function with increasing amplitude and period characteristics, which was suggested as the best combination of wave shape in Ref. [1]. The objective is to estimate the optimal shape of a wavy-shaped fin array to minimize the average temperature of the base plate of fin array under a fixed fin volume constraint. The results of the numerical analysis indicate that only when the design variables of deformed sinusoidal function can be estimated correctly, the optimal design of wavy-shaped fin can be obtained. The estimated optimal design fin array (Fin#4) has better heat dissipation characteristic than Straight-shaped (Fin#1), deformed sinusoidal-shaped (Fin#2), and regular sinusoidal-shaped (Fin#3) fin arrays since the average relative temperature (in the Celsius scale) of the base plate can decrease 8.78%, 1.45% and 1.35%, respectively, besides, the performances of both heat dissipation and power consumption of Fin#4 are better than those of Fin#3. Finally, experimental verifications are performed on the fabricated wavy-shaped fin array modules. The measurement results illustrate that the maximum relative error of temperatures between the numerical solutions and experimental data at inlet velocity w_o = 1.0 m/s for Fin#1, Fin#3 and Fin#4 along four specified measurement lines are calculated as 2.54%. It implies an excellent agreement between the numerical and experimental temperature distributions on those wavy-shaped fin array modules.