23 European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering CPU Heat Sink Cooled by Nanofluids and Water: Experimental and Numerical Study

In this study, a commercial heat sink was employed for cooling a PC processor. Two liquids were used (i) water and (ii) copper oxide (II) nanofluids with 0.0086 and 0.0225 volume fractions. In the experiments, the heat sink was fixed to the CPU. The maximal power dissipated by the investigated processor was 115 W. The mass flow rate of the liquids was in the range of 0.009 to 0.05 kg/s and the inlet temperature was in the range of 300 to 305 K. The experimental results were used to validate the numerical model of the analyzed system. The commercial package ANSYS Fluent 13 was employed to generate a CFD heat transfer simulation. A laminar flow regime was proposed in a fin array area of the heat sink. An appropriate grid quality model was developed and validated. The obtained results showed that water was sufficient enough for CPU cooling.