scholarly journals Spray Cooling On Enhanced Surfaces: a Review of the Progress and Mechanisms

Author(s):  
Rui-Na Xu ◽  
Gaoyuan Wang ◽  
Peixue Jiang

Abstract The rapid development of electronics, energy and propulsion systems has led us to the point where their performances are limited by cooling capacities. Heat fluxes of 10~100, even over 1,000 W/cm2 need to be dissipated with minimum coolant flow rate in next-generation power electronics. Spray cooling is a high heat flux, uniform and efficient cooling technique proven effective in various applications. However, its cooling capacity and efficiency need to be further improved to meet next-generation ultrahigh-power applications. Engineering of surface properties and structures can fundamentally affect the liquid-wall interactions, thus becoming the most promising way to enhance spray cooling. However, the unclear mechanisms of surface-enhanced spray cooling cause lack of guiding principles for surface design. Here, progress in spray cooling on surfaces with structures of different scales are reviewed and their performances evaluated and compared. Spray cooling can achieve critical heat flux (CHF) above 945 W/cm2 and heat transfer coefficient (HTC) up to 57 W/cm2K on structured surfaces for pressurized nozzle and CHF and HTC up to 1250 W/cm2 and 250 W/cm2K, respectively, on a smooth surface with the assistance of secondary gas flow. CHF enhancement of 110% was achieved on hybrid micro- and nanostructured surfaces. A clear map of enhancement mechanisms is proposed after analysis. Some future concerns are also proposed. This work helps the understanding and design of engineered surfaces in spray cooling and provides insights for interdisciplinary applications of heat transfer and advanced engineering materials.

Author(s):  
Jensen Hoke ◽  
Todd Bandhauer ◽  
Jack Kotovsky ◽  
Julie Hamilton ◽  
Paul Fontejon

Liquid-vapor phase change heat transfer in microchannels offers a number of significant advantages for thermal management of high heat flux laser diodes, including reduced flow rates and near constant temperature heat rejection. Modern laser diode bars can produce waste heat loads >1 kW cm−2, and prior studies show that microchannel flow boiling heat transfer at these heat fluxes is possible in very compact heat exchanger geometries. This paper describes further performance improvements through area enhancement of microchannels using a pyramid etching scheme that increases heat transfer area by ∼40% over straight walled channels, which works to promote heat spreading and suppress dry-out phenomenon when exposed to high heat fluxes. The device is constructed from a reactive ion etched silicon wafer bonded to borosilicate to allow flow visualization. The silicon layer is etched to contain an inlet and outlet manifold and a plurality of 40μm wide, 200μm deep, 2mm long channels separated by 40μm wide fins. 15μm wide 150μm long restrictions are placed at the inlet of each channel to promote uniform flow rate in each channel as well as flow stability in each channel. In the area enhanced parts either a 3μm or 6μm sawtooth pattern was etched vertically into the walls, which were also scalloped along the flow path with the a 3μm periodicity. The experimental results showed that the 6μm area-enhanced device increased the average maximum heat flux at the heater to 1.26 kW cm2 using R134a, which compares favorably to a maximum of 0.95 kw cm2 dissipated by the plain walled test section. The 3μm area enhanced test sections, which dissipated a maximum of 1.02 kW cm2 showed only a modest increase in performance over the plain walled test sections. Both area enhancement schemes delayed the onset of critical heat flux to higher heat inputs.


Author(s):  
Qian Li ◽  
Wei Wang ◽  
Chris Oshman ◽  
Benoit Latour ◽  
Chen Li ◽  
...  

Thermal management plays an important role in both high power electronics and energy conversion systems. A key issue in thermal management is the dissipation of the high heat flux generated by functional components. In this paper, various microstructures, nanostructures and hybrid micro/nano-structures were successfully fabricated on copper (Cu) surfaces, and the corresponding pool boiling heat transfer performance was systematically studied. It is found that the critical heat flux (CHF) of hybrid structured surfaces is about 15% higher than that of the surfaces with nanowires only and micro-pillars only. More importantly, the superheat at CHF for the hybrid structured surface is much smaller than that of the micro-pillared surface (about 35%), and a maximum heat transfer coefficient (HTC) of about 90,000W/m2K is obtained. Compared with the known best pool boiling performance on biporous media, a much larger HTC and much lower superheat at a heat flux of 250W/cm2 have been obtained on the novel hybrid-structured surfaces.


Author(s):  
Chang-Nian Chen ◽  
Ji-Tian Han ◽  
Wei-Ping Gong ◽  
Tien-Chien Jen

High heat flux is very dangerous for electronic heat transfer, such as IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) cooling. In order to explore and master the heat transfer and hydraulic characteristics for IGBT cooling, experiments have been carried out to study the situation mentioned above in a flat plate heat sink, which was designed for high heat flux IGBT cooling. The geometrical parameters of the test section are as follows: outline dimension 229 mm × 124 mm × 30 mm; flow channels of 229 mm × 3 mm × 4 mm in total of 20. The experiments performed at atmospheric pressure and with inlet temperatures of 25–35°C, heat fluxes of 3.5–18.9 kW/m2. The influence of temperatures, heat fluxes on IGBT surface temperature and the cooling effect of the liquid cold plate have been investigated under a range of flow rates of 280–2300 kg/m2s. It was found that the heat transfer enhancement was very obvious using this kind of small sized channel for IGBT cooling, which was tens of times of the effect than air cooling or triple of the effect than that in normal sized channels. And the heat transfer enhancement increases with increasing heat fluxes and flow rates, while it decreases with increasing inlet temperatures. Most of the experimental results show good cooling effect as expected. However, it is dangerous for the cooling system under high heat fluxes when the system starts or stops suddenly, when the Respond Time (RT) is less than 5 seconds to cut off heated power. Also, the cooling performance is bad when the heat fluxes increased greatly, which is considered as abnormal situation in operating. The effect on IGBT surface temperature of heat flux is more obvious when the average Nusselt Number is smaller. For hydraulic characteristics observed, it was found that the flow friction increased with flow rates increasing, but the pressure drops of heated flow channels ahead were slightly larger than those back, especially under large flow rates conditions. That is because the temperatures of flow heated in channels ahead are lower than those back, which causes the fluid viscosity to be higher. At last, this paper suggested a series of method for enhancing heat transfer in flat plate heat sink, and also gave some ways to avoid heat transfer dangerous situations for IGBT cooling, which can provide a basis for thermodynamic and hydraulic calculation of flat plate heat sink design and lectotype.


Author(s):  
Jianwei Gao ◽  
Hongxia Li ◽  
Saif Almheiri ◽  
TieJun Zhang

Thermal management is essential to compact devices particularly for high heat flux removal applications. As a popular thermal technology, refrigeration cooling is able to provide relatively high heat flux removal capability and uniform device surface temperature. In a refrigeration cycle, the performance of evaporator is extremely important to the overall cooling efficiency. In a well-designed evaporator, effective flow boiling heat transfer can be achieved whereas the critical heat flux (CHF) or dryout condition must be avoided. Otherwise the device surface temperature would rise significantly and cause device burnout due to the poor heat transfer performance of film boiling. In order to evaluate the influence of varying imposed heat fluxes, saturated flow boiling in the evaporator is systematically studied. The complete refrigerant flow boiling hysteresis between the imposed heat flux and the exit wall superheat is characterized. Upon the occurrence of CHF at the evaporator wall exit, the wall heat flux redistributes due to the axial wall heat conduction, which drives the dryout point to propagate upstream in the evaporator. As a result, a significant amount of thermal energy is stored in the evaporator wall. While the heat flux starts decreasing, the dryout point moves downstream and closer to the exit. The stored heat in the wall dissipates slowly and leads to the delay in rewetting or quenching, which is the key to understand and predict the flow boiling hysteresis. In order to reveal the transient heat releasing mechanism, an augmented separated-flow model is developed to predict the moving rewetting point and minimum heat flux at the evaporator exit, and the model predictions are further validated by experimental data from a refrigeration cooling testbed.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ranjith Kandasamy ◽  
Jinlong Xie ◽  
Teck Neng Wong ◽  
Fei Duan ◽  
Edwin Hang Tong Teo ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 196 ◽  
pp. 00021
Author(s):  
Karapet Eloyan ◽  
Alexey Kreta ◽  
Egor Tkachenko

One of the promising ways of removing large heat fluxes from the surface of heat-stressed elements of electronic devices is the use of evaporating thin layer of liquid film, moving under the action of the gas flow in a flat channel. In this work, a prototype of evaporative cooling system for high heat flux removal with forced circulation of liquid and gas coolants with controlled pulsation, capable to remove heat flux of up to 1,5 kW/cm2 and higher was presented. For the first time the regime with controlled pulsation is used. Due to pulsations, it is possible to achieve high values of critical heat flux due to a brief increase in the flow rate of the liquid, which allows to "wash off" large dry spots and prevent the occurrence of zones of flow and drying.


Author(s):  
Sai Sujith Obuladinne ◽  
Huseyin Bostanci

Two-phase spray cooling has been an emerging thermal management technique offering high heat transfer coefficients (HTCs) and critical heat flux (CHF) levels, near-uniform surface temperatures, and efficient coolant usage that enables to design of compact and lightweight systems. Due to these capabilities, spray cooling is a promising approach for high heat flux applications in computing, power electronics, and optics. The two-phase spray cooling inherently depends on saturation temperature-pressure relationships of the working fluid to take advantage of high heat transfer rates associated with liquid-vapor phase change. When a certain application requires strict temperature and/or pressure conditions, thermophysical properties of the working fluid play a critical role in attaining proper efficiency, reliability, or packaging structure. However, some of the commonly used working fluids today, including refrigerants and dielectric liquids, have relatively poor properties and heat transfer performance. In such cases, utilizing binary mixtures to tune working fluid properties becomes an alternative approach. This study aimed to conduct an initial investigation on the spray cooling characteristics of practically important binary mixtures and demonstrate their capability for challenging high heat flux applications. The working fluid, water/2-propanol binary mixture at various concentration levels, specifically at x1 (liquid mass fraction of 2-proponal in water) of 0.0 (pure water), 0.25, 0.50, 0.879 (azeotropic mixture) and 1.0, represented both non-azeotropic and azeotropic cases. Tests were performed on a closed loop spray cooling system using a pressure atomized spray nozzle with a constant liquid flow rate at corresponding 20°C subcooling conditions and 1 Atm pressure. A copper test section measuring 10 mm × 10 mm × 2 mm with a plain, smooth surface simulated high heat flux source. Experimental procedure involved controlling the heat flux in increasing steps, and recording the steady-state temperatures to obtain cooling curves in the form of surface superheat vs heat flux. The obtained results showed that pure water (x1 = 0.0) and 2-propanol (x1 = 1.0) provide the highest and lowest heat transfer performance, respectively. At a given heat flux level, the HTC values indicated strong dependence on x1, where the HTCs depress proportional to the concentration difference between the liquid and vapor phases. The CHF values sharply decreased at x1≥ 0.25.


2019 ◽  
Vol 196 ◽  
pp. 00062
Author(s):  
Vladimir Kuznetsov ◽  
Alisher Shamirzaev ◽  
Alexander Mordovskoy

This paper presents the results of an experimental study of the heat transfer during flow boiling of refrigerant R236fa in a horizontal microchannel heat sink. The experiments were performed using closed loop that re-circulates coolant. Microchannel heat exchanger that contains two microchannels with 2x0.4 mm cross-section was used as the test section. The dependence of average heat flux on wall superheat and critical heat flux were measured in the range of mass fluxes from 600 to 1600 kg/m2s and in the range of heat fluxes from 5 to 120 W/cm2. For heat flux greater than 60 W/cm2, nucleate boiling suppression has significant effect on the flow boiling heat transfer, and this leads to decrease of the heat transfer coefficient with heat flux grows.


Author(s):  
Dwight Cooke ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

Pool boiling is of interest in high heat flux applications because of its potential for removing large amount of heat resulting from the latent heat of evaporation and little pressure drop penalty for circulating coolant through the system. However, the heat transfer performance of pool boiling systems is not adequate to match the cooling ability provided by enhanced microchannels operating under single-phase conditions. The objective of this work is to evaluate the pool boiling performance of structured surface features etched on a silicon chip. The performance is normalized with respect to a plain chip. This investigation also focuses on the bubble dynamics on plain and structured microchannel surfaces under various heat fluxes in an effort to understand the underlying heat transfer mechanism. This work is expected to lead to improved enhancement features for extending the pool boiling option to meet the high heat flux removal demands in electronic cooling applications.


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