| Summary: | In this paper, the forced convective heat transfer performance of heat sinks produced by Selective Laser Melting (SLM) was experimentally investigated. Three heat sinks comprising pin fins of circular, rectangular-rounded and aerofoil geometries were fabricated by SLM from aluminium alloy AlSi10Mg powder. The heat sinks were tested in a rectangular air flow channel for convective heat transfer performance. Experiments performed for Reynolds numbers ranging from 3400 to 24,000 show that the heat transfer performances of the aerofoil and rectangular-rounded heat sinks exceeded those of the circular heat sink. Using the cylindrical heat sink as a benchmark, the average enhancements in the normalised Nusselt numbers were computed to be 15.0% and 21.4% for the rectangular-rounded and aerofoil heat sinks, respectively. It was demonstrated that SLM can be employed to design and fabricate heat sinks of customised geometries for heat sink applications.
|
|---|