Plate Micro-Fins in Natural Convection: Experimental Study on Thermal Effectiveness and Mass Usage

Abstract

Every year, micro-technologies are gaining more attention among researchers and industries. Although they are already applied for cooling purposes in several installations, the researches on the thermal performance of micro-fins in natural convective conditions are yet limited. The correlations between heat transfer coefficients and geometry have already been investigated. The present study merges the results of an original experimental investigation with the data available in literature, in order to give an overview of the behavior of micro-fins in terms of different heat sink metrics: the fin effectiveness and the mass specific heat transfer coefficient. The introduction of micro-fins is found not to be always beneficial in terms of heat transfer, although always positive in terms of the material usage and can be considered advantageous in those applications that requires a minimized weight of the heat sinks.