University of Utah Team Wins Aluminum-AM Heat Sink Challenge

A team of University of Utah students has won the 2021 ASME/K16 and IEEE/EPS Heat Sink Design Challenge, an international competition where students competed to design an additively manufactured aluminum natural-convection heat sink that provided maximum performance. The heat sink had to be designed to operate at as low a temperature as possible for as low a cost as possible. The University of Utah team competed against 21 other teams.

“The 2021 competition involved designing a forced convection heat sink,” says team member Bence Csontos, “so after our initial research phase we began designing a forced convection heat sink to practice what we learned from research papers. We also toured a local AM company to get a sense for the limitations of AM to consider in our design process. We arrived at a pin fin shaped heat sink that had a series of revolved airfoils stack on top of one another to maximize surface area, minimize mass which reduced cost, and utilized principles in fluid mechanics and heat transfer physics.”

See also: GE Additive

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