heatsink.pro
Plate-fin heat sinks in ducted forced air
Give it the heat sink, the airflow and the parts that make the heat. It gives back the temperature of every part, a map of the base, the fan’s operating point and a report you can print.
Access is by invitation
heatsink.pro is in private beta. Invited people sign in with their GitHub account.
Not invited yet? Write to hello@heatsink.pro with your GitHub username.
What it does today
- Plate-fin heat sinks in a duct: width, length, fin height, base and fin thickness and number of fins.
- Separate fin and base materials: aluminum alloys, copper, carbon steel, stainless steels, or your own conductivity and density.
- Airflow set by approach velocity, flow rate, maximum pressure drop, or a fan curve with 1 to 10 identical fans in parallel. Ambient temperature and altitude.
- Up to 150 rectangular heat sources, each with its own power, size, position, thermal interface and junction-to-case resistance.
- Base, case and junction temperature of every source, and its margin to a temperature limit you set.
- Thermal resistance, pressure drop, flow, air velocities, outlet air temperature, fin efficiency and weight.
- A base temperature map on a 40 × 40 grid, downloadable as CSV.
- Fan and system curves with the operating point.
- Metric or US units. Projects saved in your browser, or downloaded and uploaded as JSON.
- A printable report of the inputs, results, map, curves, and the model’s limits.
How it calculates
Each channel between two fins is treated as flow between parallel plates, using published correlations from the heat transfer literature:
- Laminar heat transfer: Stephan’s correlation for developing flow (Shah and London, 1978)
- Turbulent heat transfer: Gnielinski’s correlation
- Pressure drop: developing-flow friction (Shah and London; Muzychka and Yovanovich, 2004), plus entrance and exit losses (Kays and London)
- Fins: one-dimensional conduction with insulated tips, accounting for the air heating up as it passes through
- Base: an exact series solution for heat spreading from each source (Muzychka, Culham and Yovanovich, 2003)
- Air properties at the mean air temperature, and altitude from the standard atmosphere
Between Reynolds numbers of 2,300 and 4,000, laminar and turbulent results are blended linearly; that rule is ours, not the literature’s. The printed report lists these assumptions and what the model leaves out.
How far to trust it
So far the calculator has been checked against textbook limiting cases and property tables, and its base model against a separate finite-volume solution, which agrees within 0.8%. It has not yet been compared with CFD simulations or measured heat sinks, so treat its results as engineering estimates, not design sign-off.
Planned, not yet built
- Checks against CFD and catalog measurements
- Natural convection and radiation
- Bypass and impinging airflow
- Liquid cooling
- Optimizing fin geometry for temperature, weight or pressure drop