A novel heat sink, called a centrifugal heat sink, into which the blades of a fan are integrated between the fins, is proposed. The fan blades, based on design principles of centrifugal turbomachinery, are arranged to be placed between the fins of the circular heat sink. The rotary motion of the blades causes nearby coolant to be sucked into and pass through channels formed by adjacent fins. Due to the integration of the blades into the space between the fins, additional space for the blades of the fan is no longer required for the centrifugal heat sinks. Consequently, this centrifugal heat sink makes efficient use of available cooling space. In this paper, an experimental investigation is conducted to demonstrate the concept of the centrifugal heat sink. As the speed of the fan increases, the average velocity is shown to increase proportionally. To evaluate the thermal performance of the centrifugal heat sink under constant heat flux conditions, the maximum temperature at the heat sink base is measured. As a result, the minimum thermal resistance of the centrifugal heat sink is found to be 0.47 K/W. In order to estimate the required pumping power and the thermal resistance, a theoretical model is also developed and validated using experimental results. From the theoretical model, optimized centrifugal heat sinks have lower thermal resistances than optimized plate-fin heat sinks under the fixed pumping power condition. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.