Cooling and thermal management are critical to data center reliability. Many organizations see cooling as a differentiating factor in the lifecycle cost of their data center. Recent industry guidelines [1] for data center cooling have suggested energy savings in air-cooled data centers by increasing the temperature of the cooling air. This increase enables two trends: reduced … [Read more...]
Organically Grown 3D Printable Heatsinks – Part 4 A Fully Automated Methodology
The additive design methodology itself is quite straightforward. It is however highly repetitive. Perform a simulation, identify a maximum temperature location, extend the geometry at that point, if thermal efficiency decreases then repeat. To appreciate and to evolve the approach I began by manually performing a number of the initial steps myself. Solve in FloTHERM, sort … [Read more...]
Organically Grown 3D Printable Heatsinks – Part 3 Smoothing the Edges
The shape of the small piece of geometry that is added so as to successively ‘relieve’ the design determines the overall ‘jaggedness’ of the final geometry. A square section rod can only lead to a stair-stepped representation of angled portions of the shape, at worse resulting in a 41% increase (2/root2) in surface area in those regions. Increase in surface area, thus … [Read more...]
Organically Grown 3D Printable Heatsinks – Part 2 Trunks and Branches
Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law states: “For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.” This can be seen at play in both animate and inanimate systems, from trees to lighting, from river systems to lungs. Such persistent systems tend to carry something … [Read more...]
Organically Grown 3D Printable Heatsinks – Part 1 A Simple Iterative Procedure
This is what a typical extruded fin heatsink looks like. It’s made of metal and sits on top of IC packages that themselves are soldered to a PCB. It cools those packages by providing an increased air apparent surface area with which to pass on the heat that has been conducted up through it. Its shape (topology) is in most ways set by the manufacturing process used to create it. … [Read more...]
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