Improving aluminum heat sink thermal performance by additive manufacturing

Heat sinks are critical to ensuring the thermal reliability of electronic devices. Heat sinks prevent devices from overheating by effectively dissipating the heat generated by these devices. While traditional heat sink designs are often limited to simple geometric shapes, developing additive manufacturing technologies make it possible to produce complex structures more efficiently and easily. This makes the use of advanced design tools such as topology optimization more meaningful. Topology optimization aims to increase thermal performance by optimizing the material by making it lighter. In the study, thermal analysis and topology optimization of heat sinks were performed and the aluminum alloy AlSi10Mg produced by additive manufacturing was selected as the material. In the steady-state thermal analyzes performed on two-dimensional models, temperature change and heat distribution were observed. The obtained thermal analysis results were integrated into the topology optimization module and it was aimed to lighten the different design and increase the cooling performance. The designs obtained as a result of the optimization show that lightening is provided effectively and thermal performance is improved. Based on these analyses, heat sinks were designed and subjected to numerical analysis. The results showed that the optimized heat sinks significantly improved the thermal performance.