Demystifying the heat sink manufacturing process

  For an air-cooled heatsink, its effect mostly depends on the design of the heat sink in addition to the air volume of the fan. A properly designed heat sink can make the computer run stably by relying only on the chassis fan when the computer is not overclocked or continuously fully loaded. It can be seen that the importance of the heat sink, and the heat dissipation effect of the heat sink is inseparable from its manufacturing process.

  Today's heat sink manufacturing processes include cutting, extrusion, stamping, die-casting and other technologies as the core, and more than a dozen specific manufacturing processes have been derived. Their advantages and disadvantages are obvious.

Cutting and aluminum extrusion

     Strictly speaking, cutting is the abbreviation of a large class of manufacturing processes, such as high-speed cutting, laser cutting, etc., belong to this category, but they have one thing in common that machine tools such as turning, drilling, milling, and grinding are used in the forming of heat sinks. In the process, in order to obtain some more special and fine shapes, it is necessary to use a cutting process. Mainly used for sheet metal forming (bottom surface, fin formation), radiator slotting, engraving of special lines, etc.

Precision cutting and aluminum die casting

    I have to say that this is a very milestone metal forming process. The definition of precision cutting is to use a precisely controlled special planer to cut a piece of metal profile with a specified thickness according to the needs, and then bend it upwards into an upright state to become a heat dissipation fin. In fact, a simpler way to understand is to cut a whole piece of metal into the shape of the heat sink that we usually see. This method is most common on pure copper heat sinks.

Folding and soldering are the mainstream

     The dense thin heat sinks we have seen are all made by this process. During forming, a small section of specially designed protruding parts remain on the edges of the fins. The fins are fixed in a customized mold, and the protruding parts are bent and locked with each other to form neatly arranged parallel fins. Combined with stamping, it is mainly used to manufacture parallel dense thin fins used in reflow soldering or air duct design.

Variety of heat sink process 

     In fact, in addition to the heatsink process forms we mentioned above, we can also often see heat sink processes such as forging and gear shaping. These processes still appear in our computer heat dissipation forms more or less, just because of cost or thermal performance. The reasons for the effect have become less and less, but these still contribute to the development of heat sink technology.