A NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF CONJUGATE HEAT-TRANSFER IN AN ELECTRONIC PACKAGE FORMED BY EMBEDDED DISCRETE HEAT-SOURCES IN CONTACT WITH A POROUS HEAT SINK

A physical/mathematical model has been developed to simulate the conju gate heat transfer in an actively cooled electronic package. The packa ge consists of a highly conductive substrate with embedded discrete he at sources that are in intimate contact with a porous channel through which a gaseous coolant is circulated The flow in the porous medium is analyzed using the extended Darcy model. The nonequilibrium, two-equa tion model which accounts for the near wall thermal dispersion effects was used for the heat transfer analysis. The concept of the general e nergy equation for the entire physical domain was employed as a method of solving numerically the conjugate system. The model has been valid ated by comparing the predictions with available experimental data for a similar system. A parametric study has been performed to examine th e effects of some of the most important model parameters on the therma l performance of porous heat sink.