CFD analyses of liquid-cooled heatsink for computer processors

With the development of technology every day, the use of electronic circuit elements or devices increases with their operating speeds or capacities, etc., but several problems arise due to the size limitations of most devices. One of the sectors in which such developments come one after the other is the computer sector, and in particular, computer processors take the lead. With the practices intending to maximize the speed of computers, the number of transistors installed in the processors, which is directly proportional to the speed of the computer processors, is increasing, on the other hand, size issues and the removal of the heat generated by the current flowing from the transistors are the rising problems. Most computer processors are designed to be air-cooled, however for long-term or intensive operations, air-cooled systems are inadequate and either computers either protect themselves or they crash. Nowadays, different solutions have been provided for heating problems of such computers and one of these solutions is to use liquid-cooled processors. In this study, a computer model of the Zalman ZM-WB3 Gold heat exchanger which is one of the liquid-cooled computer processors in the market, has been generated, the model has been confirmed by the previous researchers' models and experimental data. Then, the fin thickness and heights of the same heat exchanger, and the type of liquid fluid in which the heat exchanger operates have been changed. The CFD analyzes of the new models were performed by using Ansys Fluent 17.1 program. Following that, nano heat removal (cooling) performances were investigated with models using rectangular fin fluid heat exchanger with different fin heights of 5 mm, 5,5 mm and 5,7 mm, and different fin thicknesses of 1,2 mm, 1,6 mm, 1,8 mm and 2 mm, and different fluids as water, copper oxide-water (CuO-H2O) nanofluids with volume ratios of 2,25% and 0,86%, and graphene oxide (GO-H2O) nanofluids with volume ratio of 0,01% and 0,02% It was concluded that the best CPU cooler performance can be achieved by using CuO - H2O as nanofluid with a volumetric ratio of 2,25% with a heat exchanger that has 5,7 mm fin height and 1,8 mm fin thickness.