With the easy availability of aluminum CNC machines, 3D printers, and advanced design software in the industrial market, there is no reason that any company should not take advantage of the benefits of rapid prototyping for heat sink design when shopping around for a turnkey heat sink manufacturing company.
You get the best results from the rapid prototyping process if all of the heat sink design and production occurs in-house. The primary benefit of rapid turnaround prototyping is that it can reduce the time from initial design to final product considerably. If you outsource any part of the process to a sub-contractor you immediately lose the benefits of the reduced design timeframe. Ideally, the production of a rapid-prototyped heat sink would happen all within the same facility.
A heat sink design that appears to be perfect on “paper” may not end up being so perfect in the real world. Heat sink design flaws might be revealed once the prototype heat sink is installed in the unit. Flaws such as inefficient heat transfer, inadequate spacing between the heat sink and other components within the unit, and flaws in the design that reduces the expected performance of the heat sink design in the finished product can create serious production problems. Poor or flawed heat sink designs can result in retool and rework costs of thousands of dollars if the flawed design goes into wide production before the issue has been addressed.
Most improvements in heat sink design are incremental. Reducing the spacing between the fins in one area of the design, adding a heat pipe to transfer heat more efficiently from the processor, or moving the heat sink to a better area of the completed unit can be subtle design changes that result in a tremendous benefit for the finished product. Rapid prototyping of heat sink design allows you to test these design changes to see what works best for the final product and improve it if necessary.
At Getec Industrial, our rapid prototyping process for aluminum heat sink designs is best-in-class. We use state-of-the-art equipment, world-class aluminum design engineers, and time-tested production processes to produce the high-quality aluminum heat sink designs that our competitors just can’t keep up with. Give us a call at 888-999-8499, contact us online, or send us an email at sales@getecna.com to speak to one of our rapid prototyping heat sink design specialists today.
