Development of 3D Printed Heatsink Integrated with Phase Change Material for Cooling Application

Electronic devices have been an integral part of human life. Most devices are susceptible to heat, and overheating has become one of the main problems in maintaining the device’s durability. Heatsink as a thermal management system takes advantage of the extended surface to transfer heat from the device to be carried away through conduction and convection. This study combines heatsink and Phase Change Material (PCM) to increase the performance of the thermal management system. The heatsink is manufactured using the 3D printing method with a cavity inside the heatsink to insert the PCM. PCM uses the latent state of a material to absorb heat at a constant temperature and is already many used in the thermal storage system. Later in the experiment, the performance of a conventional heatsink is compared with a heatsink that is injected with PCM. The experiment is done with different variations of airspeed: 1m/s, 1.5m/s, and 2m/s, heater power: 30W, 40W, and 50W, and PCM: soy wax and palm wax. The experiment result shows that PCM is effective in lowering the heatsink steady-state temperature, especially under high heat flux when the melting point has been reached with temperature degradation 7.7% for soy wax and 13.3% for palm wax. The performance of palm wax is better than soy wax which has the highest thermal conductance of 2.34W/K and a higher enhancement ratio than soy wax which is 1.62.