Selecting the best type of heat sink for your application

The need for heat sinks with increased cooling capacity has been driven by the ever increasing heat generation of electronic devices. This has led to the increased manufacture of pin fin heat sinks as shown in figure 1 that vendors claim has vastly superior performance to the traditional plate fin heat sink with continuous parallel fins as shown in figure 2. Is this claim true? Like most engineering answers….it depends.

Pioneer Thermal Copper Heat Sink

The goal of a heat sink is to efficiently remove heat from the source(s) it is attached to so as to minimize the temperature of that source(s). The performance of the heat sink is governed by this simple heat transfer equation:

$\displaystyle Q_{s}=hA(T_{s}-T_{amb})$ 1

where:
$\displaystyle Q_{s}$ is the heat from the source(s) being cooled
$\displaystyle h$ is the convection coefficient of the heat sink
$\displaystyle A$ is the total surface area of the heat sink
$\displaystyle T_{s}$ is the temperature of the source being cooled
$\displaystyle T_{amb}$ is the ambient temperature

Any heat sink with a larger value of h x A will be able to produce a lower source temperature.

Selecting the best type of heat sink for your application

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