Estimating Forced Convection Cooled Heat Sink Performance in a Ventilated Enclosure (Part 2)
The HeatSinkCalculator includes an option to input a fan curve of the fan used to cool the heat sink. This option can be exploited to allow the simulation of the heat sink and fan in a ventilated enclosure as was outlined in part 1 of this article.
It is assumed that the readers of this article already reviewed part 1. Recall from the previous article equation 1 that defines the total pressure difference around the flow network loop.
(1)
The pressure differences across the fan and two ventilation openings can be summed to create a single parameter ΔPfan* that defines the total pressure difference across all three components. The parameter ΔPfan* represents the modified fan curve. This calculation is carried out at the specified volumetric flow rate of each point on the fan curve to generate the modified fan curve. Equation 1 is now reduced to equation 2. Please note that the pressure difference across the fan is considered positive since the pressure increases along the direction of the flow and the pressure difference across the ventilation opening is negative because there is a pressure decrease along the direction of flow.
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