Exercise 5 · steady conduction with convection and radiation

The heat sink

The mission

Before you compute

Configure

Design

Heat sink cross-section: a finned base with the device footprint underneath
  • aluminium
  • air
  • device footprint

Section or solid

The cross-section is exact for an extrusion and assumes the device heats it evenly along its whole length. Solve the body instead and the device can be shorter than the sink — which costs a spreading resistance, and gains two cut ends.

Conditions

Advancednumerics, and two model switches

These change the error, not the answer. How much they change it is what the verification panel measures.

The last two are different: they change the model rather than the error. Turning radiation off, or pinning the convection coefficient, is how you see what the simpler model would have told you — and every run that uses one says so.

Checking what this server can do…

Why it happens

Kept runs

Understand the model

Everything the exercise rests on, in the order it matters. Nothing here has been shortened — it has been moved out of the way of the experiment.

For teachers

Note. These models are for exploring ideas and comparing designs. They are not professional engineering tools.