The drive for small and compact electronic components with higher processing capabilities is limited by their ability to dissipate the associated heat generated during operations, and hence, more advanced heat sink designs are required. Recently, the emergence of additive manufacturing techniques facilitated the fabrication of complex structures and overcame the limitation of traditional techniques such as milling, drilling, and casting. Therefore, complex heat sink designs are now easily realizable. In this study, we propose a design procedure for mathematically realizable architected heat sinks and investigate their performance using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach. The proposed heat sinks are mathematically designed with topologies based on triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMSs). Three-dimensional CFD models are developed using the starccm+ platform for uniform heat sinks and topologically graded heat sinks to study the heat transfer performance in forced convection domains. The overall heat transfer coefficient, surface temperature, and pressure drop versus the input heat sources as well as the Reynolds number are used to evaluate the heat sink performance. Moreover, temperature contours and velocity streamlines were examined to analyze the fluid flow behavior within the heat sinks. Results showed that the tortuosity and channel complexity of the Diamond solid-networks heat sink result in a 32% increase in convective heat transfer coefficient compared with the Gyroid solid-network heat sink which has the comparable surface area under the examined flow conditions. This increase is at the expense of increased pressure drops which increases by the same percentage. In addition, it was found that expanding channel size along flow direction using the porosity grading approach results in significant pressure drop (27.6%), while the corresponding drop in convective heat transfer is less significant (15.7%). These results show the importance of employing functional grading in the design of heat sinks. Also, the manufacturability of the proposed designs was assessed using computerized tomography (CT) scan and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging performed on metallic samples fabricated using powder bed fusion techniques. A visible number of internal manufacturing defects can affect the performance of the proposed heat sinks.

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In this work, we extend our heat transfer performance study on our proposed new and novel 3D printable architected heat sinks with geometrically complex structures based on triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS). Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling is used to assess the effect of porosity distribution, heat load, and isothermal boundary condition on the performance of the proposed TPMS-based heat sinks in active cooling using natural and forced convection heat transfer environments. The convection heat transfer coefficient, surface temperature, pressure drop are predicted using CFD method. The CFD model is validated using experimental results for the pressure drop and is verified by standard analytical results. Three TPMS structures are investigated in different orientations. Dimensionless heat transfer groups are developed to globalize the heat transfer performance of the proposed heat sinks.

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The current developments in additive manufacturing (3D printing) overcome the limitations of traditional fabrication techniques such as milling, drilling and casting and allow to fabricate geometrically-complex heat sinks for which the topological features are capitalized upon to enhance the thermal performance. In this work, we propose new and novel 3D printable architected heat sinks with geometrically complex structures based on triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS). Their printability with laser-based metal additive manufacturing is assessed using electron microscopy techniques. Moreover, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling is used to assess the effect of geometry on the performance of the proposed TPMS-based heat sinks in active cooling using forced convection heat transfer environment. The convection heat transfer coefficient, surface temperature, pressure drop are predicted using CFD method. The results showed that the heat transfer performance does not depend on the architects porosity alone, but also depends on the heat sink solid-networks structure.