Miniaturization of electronic devices leads to new heat dissipation challenges and traditional cooling methods need to be replaced by new better ones. Polymer heat sinks may, thanks to their unique properties, replace standardly used heat sink materials in certain applications, especially in applications with high ambient temperature. Polymers natively dispose of high surface emissivity in comparison with glossy metals. This high emissivity allows a larger amount of heat to be dissipated to the ambient with the fourth power of its absolute surface temperature. This paper shows the change in radiative and convective heat transfer from polymer heat sinks used in different ambient temperatures. Furthermore, the observed polymer heat sinks have differently oriented graphite filler caused by their molding process differences, therefore their thermal conductivity anisotropies and overall cooling efficiencies also differ. Furthermore, it is also shown that a high radiative heat transfer leads to minimizing these cooling efficiency differences between these polymer heat sinks of the same geometry. The measurements were conducted at HEATLAB, Brno University of Technology.
Keywords: composites; convection; polymer heat sink; radiation; thermal conductivity; thermal management.