Investigation of a Multiple Impeller Design for a High Performance Air-Cooled Heat Sink

A high-performance air-cooled heat sink that incorporates a novel heat pipe with multiple parallel condenser layers and interdigitated blower impellers is presented. A flow circuit model was developed in order to predict the air flow performance of a 15-layer impeller system using experimental measurements from a single layer. A 15-layer impeller system was constructed to validate the flow circuit model. The performance of the multi-layer system was investigated by using a hot wire anemometer to compare flow between layers and by measuring the inflation rate of a bag enclosing the air outlets. This work addresses important issues that allow the extension of the air flow modeling and experimental results from a single impeller design to a multilayer stack of impellers operating in parallel and sharing a common inlet.