ANALYTICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF HEAT TRANSFER CHARACTERISTICS OF FINS

Abstract

Fins are extensively used in air cooled automobile engines and air craft engines, cooling of generators, motors, transformers , refrigerator, cooling of computer processors, and other electronic devices etc. Fins are also used in compact heat exchangers. In natural convection mode, the devices are likely to operate at a higher temperature and with undetermined reliability. The failure rate of electronic component increases almost exponentially with operating temperature. The cooler the electronic device operates, the more reliable it is. So, a properly designed heat sink should work so as to maintain the components at low temperature and thus reduce the risk of failure .there have been continuous research on improving the efficiency of heat exchange systems using fins involving natural convection and forced convection. Natural convection heat transfer with the help of finned surfaces often offers an economical and trouble free solution and without any acoustic noise. Also our objective is to study the effect of different fin parameters like heat input, orientation of fins, fin spacing, fin length on the heat transfer characteristics. Many experiments have been done to get the optimum design of fins so that maximum heat transfer through fins can be achieved. It was observed that heat transfer characteristics significantly influenced by different fin characteristics.