Importance of Thermal management “Heat sink” and its types:

Sathya Priya N
2 min readJul 22, 2023

Thermal management plays a crucial role in ensuring the functionality and product life time in PCBs. As the electronic devices become more powerful, managing heat becomes increasingly important. The excessive heat can lead to performance issues, reduced lifespan and even damage to electronic components.

Heat sink is one of the common method used to remove the excess heat from PCBs and maintain the operating temperature.

Heat sink
Image by Electronic

A heat sink is a passive thermal management device designed to dissipate the heat away from components, thereby preventing overheating. The material used for heat sink is aluminium and copper which has the high thermal conductivity but copper is bit expensive.

How heat sink works?

It works on the principle of conduction. The heat generated in the PCB components are transferred to heat sink, heat is dissipated over large surface area into the surrounding air.

Heat transfer from heat sink
Image by Electronics Cooling

Types of heat sink:

Active heat sink: This will generally have a fan consists of moving parts. The fan circulated the air over the heat sink and enchance the heat dissipation.

Passive heat sink: These have no moving or mechanical parts. They rely on radiation for heat dissipation. Depends on manufacturing its types are below,

Types

Thank you,

Sathya Priya N

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Sathya Priya N

Embedded Engineer| Electronics| Embedded systems| PCB| Hardware|