In the present study, experimental and numerical results of the beat transfer characteristics of the in line and staggered taper pin fin heat sink under constant heat flux conditions are presented. An experimental apparatus is set up to analyze the problem. The tapered pin fin heat sink is fabricated from square aluminium with length, base and tip diameters of 67, 13 and 7.24 mm, respectively. Experiments are performed at various air Reynolds numbers in the range of 1000-9000 and heat fluxes in the range of 0.91-3.64 kW/m(2). The number of pin fins for the in line and staggered configurations are 16 and 17, respectively. The k-epsilon standard turbulence model is employed to simulate the turbulent beat transfer characteristics. A finite volume method with an unstructured non-uniform grid system is employed for solving the model. The predicted results are validated by comparing with measured data. The predicted results are in reasonable agreement with the experiments. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.