Header Design Optimization of Mini-channel Heat Sinks Using CuO–H2O and Al2O3–H2O Nanofluids for Thermal Management

Thermal management of electronics is a critical part of maintaining high efficiency and reliability. Adequate cooling must be balanced with weight and volumetric requirements, especially for passive air-cooling solutions in electronics applications where space and weight are at a premium. It should be noted that there are systems where thermal solution takes more than 95% of the total weight of the system. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate and utilize advanced materials to design low weight and compact systems. Many of the advanced materials have anisotropic thermal properties and their performances depend strongly on taking advantage of superior properties in the desired directions. Therefore, control of thermal conductivity plays an important role in utilization of such materials for cooling applications. Because of the complexity introduced by anisotropic properties, thermal performances of advanced materials are yet to be fully understood. Present study is an experimental and computational study on characterization of thermal performances of advanced materials for heat sink applications. Numerical simulations and experiments are performed to characterize thermal performances of four different materials. An estimated weight savings in excess of 75% with lightweight materials are observed compared to the traditionally used heat sinks.

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Reduced Order Design Optimization of Liquid Cooled Heat Sinks

Journal of Electronic Packaging ◽

10.1115/1.4052400 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 143 (4) ◽

Author(s):

Aniket Ajay Lad ◽

Kai A. James ◽

William P. King ◽

Nenad Miljkovic

Keyword(s):

Design Optimization ◽

Power Density ◽

Building Blocks ◽

Optimization Methods ◽

Population Based ◽

Global Optimum ◽

Heat Sinks ◽

Geometrical Parameters ◽

Power Module ◽

Reduced Order

Abstract The recent growth in electronics power density has created a significant need for effective thermal management solutions. Liquid-cooled heat sinks or cold plates are typically used to achieve high volumetric power density cooling. A natural tradeoff exists between the thermal and hydraulic performance of a cold plate, creating an opportunity for design optimization. Current design optimization methods rely on computationally expensive and time consuming computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Here, we develop a rapid design optimization tool for liquid cooled heat sinks based on reduced-order models for the thermal-hydraulic behavior. Flow layout is expressed as a combination of simple building blocks on a divided coarse grid. The flow layout and geometrical parameters are incorporated to optimize designs that can effectively address heterogeneous cooling requirements within electronics packages. We demonstrate that the use of population-based searches for optimal layout selection, while not ensuring a global optimum solution, can provide optimal or near-optimal results for most of the test cases studied. The approach is shown to generate optimal designs within a timescale of 60–120 s. A case study based on cooling of a commercial silicon carbide (SiC) electronics power module is used to demonstrate the application of the developed tool and is shown to improve the performance as compared to an aggressive state-of-the-art single-phase liquid cooling solution by reducing the SiC junction-to-coolant thermal resistance by 25% for the same pressure drop.

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Temperature Uniformity in Cross-Flow Double-Layered Microchannel Heat Sinks

Fluids ◽

10.3390/fluids5030143 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 143

Author(s):

Carlo Nonino ◽

Stefano Savino

Keyword(s):

Numerical Study ◽

Cross Flow ◽

Bottom Layer ◽

Heat Sinks ◽

Temperature Uniformity ◽

Counter Flow ◽

Microchannel Heat Sinks ◽

Unequal Number ◽

Flow Configurations ◽

Header Design

An in-house finite element method (FEM) procedure is used to carry out a numerical study on the thermal behavior of cross-flow double-layered microchannel heat sinks with an unequal number of microchannels in the two layers. The thermal performance is compared with those yielded by other more conventional flow configurations. It is shown that if properly designed, i.e., with several microchannels in the top layer smaller than that in the bottom layer, cross-flow double-layered microchannel heat sinks can provide an acceptable thermal resistance and a reasonably good temperature uniformity of the heated base with a header design that is much simpler than that required by the counter-flow arrangement.

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