ABSTRACT The increasing power density of modern electronics necessitates compact and highly efficient thermal management solutions. Perforated pin‐fin heat‐sinks offer a promising approach to enhance heat dissipation over traditional solid‐fin designs. This study uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate the thermo‐hydraulic performance of circular pin‐fin heat‐sinks with four different pin geometries: solid, single‐hole perforated, twin‐hole perforated, and fully‐hollow. The geometries were analyzed in both in‐line and staggered arrays under forced convection for a range of Reynolds numbers (5000 ≤ Re ≤ 25,000). All perforated configurations outperformed the solid pin baseline. The fully‐hollow, staggered array demonstrated the most significant improvement, reducing average heat‐sink temperatures by 9°C and thermal resistance by up to 38% at Re ≈ 25,000. This configuration also achieved a 1.6 increase in the overall performance evaluation criterion. The study demonstrates that perforations and staggered spacing synergistically enhance thermal performance by re‐energizing boundary layers and increasing turbulent mixing, without incurring proportional pumping power penalties. Hollow staggered pins are a sustainable, low‐mass solution for dissipating high heat fluxes in next‐generation power electronics.
Mahmoud et al. (Thu,) studied this question.