Design of additive manufactured passive heat sinks for electronics

During the last decades, in industrial applications the integration of electronic components shifted its focus on reliability. In fact, the high thermal power generated by electronic systems can cause system failure and even irreversible damage, due to their ongoing miniaturization and complexity. This work aims to explore solutions for the optimal design of passive heat sinks to be fabricated by additive manufacturing. The methodology involves the use of CAE and thermal topological optimization tools, to analyse the thermal loads and the heat sink performance, and consequently to optimize the heat sink design. A simple case study allows to compare three different geometrical heat sink configurations, corresponding to the optimal solutions for three different sets of constraints, namely only volume constraints, laser-powder bed process design and internal heat generation. The predominant role of heat conduction is demonstrated and significant weight reduction and high efficiency are combined in topology optimized passive heat sinks to be fabricated by AM.