ASME/IEEE Heat Sink Design Challenge

Challenge overview

As my senior design project for my B.S. in mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, I competed in a heat sink design competition. Titled the "The ASME/IEEE Heat Sink Design Challenge," competing student teams were tasked with designing creative and efficient passive heat sink designs to be manufactured using additive manufacturing (AM). A major motivation for the competition was in creating innovative heat sink designs that fully utilized AM processes. Challenge participants were to design heat sinks that dissipated the most amount of heat using the least amount of material. Our final heat sink design and submission won the competition as it was the most efficient heat sink of all submissions. The final heat sink design is shown below.

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A render of our challenge-winning heat sink design.

The performance of the top eight teams is given in the table below. The goal of the competition was to maximize the figure of merit (FOM) which is a function of the heat sink temperature and the heat sink mass/cost. Our heat sink design (team Toposink) had the lowest base temperature (Tj) and was the second lightest of all heat sinks tested.

Team (Top 8) Tj [°C] Tamb [°C] Mass [g] Cost [$] Experimental FOM COMSOL FOM
Toposink 89 36 74 4.44 4.28 2.70
Hot Hogs 107 35 71 4.26 3.23 1.51
Happy Valley 99 31 87 5.22 2.83 2.42
K-State Snowcats 108 37 97 5.82 2.43 2.21
Team Turbulence 132 35 73 4.38 2.36 2.13
OSU OVERCLOCKING 124 34 98 5.88 1.89 1.68
HogSink 133 36 96 5.76 1.78 1.59
Badger Engineers 127 35 105 6.30 1.73 1.06

As a final portion of the competition, one of our group members, Bence Csontos, presented our design at the ITherm conference to the competition judges. Our combined performance from our presentation and heat sink design led us to win the competition out of 20+ total international submissions. We received a neat plaque for winning the competition which is shown in digital form below.

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Award certificate from the competition.

As part of our senior design course, we created a poster that covered our process for designing the heat sink. This poster was created before the competition was finalized and thus contains a version of the heat sink that varies from our final submission.

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Poster that covers our design process for the heat sink. Copyrighted logos are omitted.

See a brief interview of our team and overview of the heat sink design challenge in the youtube video below and the corresponding
University of Utah Press Release

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