Additive Manufacturing for Enhancing Thermal Dissipation in Heat Sink Implementation: A Review

Advances in manufacturing technologies and the recent explosion of materials and methods for creating additively manufactured devices has opened new avenues for novel heat sink designs that can be optimized for flow and conduction considerations. This review paper highlights many of the recent successes and challenges associated with the utilization of “3 D printed” heat sinks for applications in electronics cooling. The purpose is to evaluate the current state of the art in additively manufactured thermal management solutions and the underlying physics and engineering approaches that illustrate the great promise of this emerging sector. The emphasis is therefore not only on the underlying strengths of additive manufacturing, such as its ability to greatly expand the realm of spatial and surface design for heat transfer, but also to illustrate some of its drawbacks that hinder its utilities in certain applications, such as the dearth of materials it can handle. This work looks toward future possibilities of custom designed heat removal schemes which utilize nontraditional geometries that were previously impossible using conventional machining methods.