Heat transfer enhancement of fin-copper foam composite structure

As the fins can significantly enhance the thermal conducting capability along the fin extending direction,the concept of combining fins with copper foam as thermal conductivity enhancer was proposed to satisfy the heat rejection requirements of some high-power electronic components used in the aviation.Fin-copper foam/paraffin samples with fin thicknesses of 0.5,0.8 and 1.0mm were processed.The thermal performances of the samples were tested via steady and transient experiments.The results suggest that the effective conductivity of composite material with 1.0mm fin reaches 11.4W/ (m·K), which is 3.7 times as that of the copper foam/paraffin and 42.2 times as that of the pure paraffin.Under the same heat flux,the maximum temperature differences of the samples with fins are reduced by 73.2%-90.0%.The tests verify that the effective thermal conductivity and the dynamic thermal response of copper foam/paraffin can be remarkably enhanced by fins.A correlation of the non-dimensional coefficients is raised via the experimental results.