Design and Experimental Verification of Air Cooled Server Enclosure: A Novel Approach for Heat Sink Characterization

Semiconductor thermal management is becoming a bottleneck challenge that restricts further development in the electronics industry. Compromising processor thermal requirements will impact the processor performance and reliability. Heat sinks are designed to increase the available surface area of an electronic component and allow for more heat to be easily dissipated. As a result, the thermal characterization of the heat sinks plays a critical role in electronics thermal management. In this study, a flexible experimental apparatus is designed, built, and assembled to characterize and test various electronics components in different aerodynamics and thermal conditions. This novel experimental apparatus allows for controlled characterization of the various heat sinks with different heights as well as realistic scenarios with air bypass at server level. Moreover, a general guideline on precise experimental procedure to characterize air cooled heat sinks is developed. The results show that introduced method reduces the experimental error by 26%.