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The purpose of this study is to use an electric field technique to design novel heat sinks capable of rejecting as much heat as possible in a limited space. Configuration of electrodes in this study can be used for increasing the efficiency of heat sinks.

This study investigates a novel electrohydrodynamic (EHD)-based heat sink for thermal management of electronic devices and thermal systems. The significant part of designing an EHD heat sink is the arrangement of the electrodes. A numerical simulation is performed for a heat sink with two parallel plates to determine the optimum dimensional configuration of electrodes. The upper plate of this heat sink is the ground electrode with a constant atmosphere temperature, and the lower plate of it with flush-mounted high-voltage electrodes has uniform heat flux.

The results show that heat transfer changes by the size of the vortices and the number of them. These vortices are emerged by the electric field, and the number of them increases with increasing the number of electrodes. The interaction of vortices size and number leads to having the lowest average temperature in the optimum case by two high voltage electrodes with widths of 7.5 mm and a 17.5 mm gap between them. In comparison with the case without the electric field, with increasing the applied voltage to 30 kV, the efficiency of this EHD heat sink increases up to 37%.

Improvements in electrical equipment make them more compact with higher heat fluxes. Hence, the amount of heat to be dissipated per area increases and needs thermal management to operate at their design temperatures. Therefore, to improve the performance and life span of electronic components and increase their efficiency, it is necessary to design heat sinks to decrease their maximum (peak) temperature.