Cooling of Heated Blocks with Triangular Guide Protrusions Simulating Printed Circuit Boards

There is no study that investigates triangular guide protrusions including their systematical geometrical changes together with the effects of channel height in the open literature in the context of the authors’ knowledge. Moreover, the number of laminar studies is less than turbulent studies, whereas low velocity or natural convection cases are still important, especially for small devices in small PCB passages. The objective of this study is to investigate numerically the effects of triangular guide protrusions for the enhancement of heat transfer from the blocks’ simulated electronic components in laminar flow conditions. Two-dimensional, incompressible, steady, and laminar flow analysis was performed to predict fluid flow and heat transfer characteristics for three heated blocks in a PCB (printed circuit board) passage with triangular guide protrusions mounted on the upper wall. The Galerkin finite element method of weighted residuals was used to discretize conservation equations. The effects of the channel expansion ratio and inlet velocity were investigated for five geometrical cases. If the size of the protrusions is increased, the existence of protrusions starts to affect the flow patterns on the lower wall. The size of the last protrusion controls the flow structure downstream of the last block. On the upper wall, after the last protrusion, a recirculation is formed and the length of the recirculation increases with an increasing Re number. Moreover, the reattachment length of recirculation after the last block increases with an increasing Reynolds number for a fixed expansion ratio. Expansion ratio and inflow conditions caused by blocks and protrusions have a great influence on the formation of secondary recirculation in addition to the Reynolds number. Heat transfer increases with increasing sizes of upper triangular protrusions. Maximum overall heat transfer enhancement is provided as 47.7% with the geometry of the maximum sized protrusions for the channel height of 3 h. In the case of 4 h, the maximum overall heat transfer enhancement is 24.21%. These enhancements in heat transfer that can be encountered in PCB cooling applications may help the PCB cooling designers.