Enhanced Flow Boiling of Ethanol in Open Microchannels With Tapered Manifolds in a Gravity-Driven Flow

Author(s):  
Philipp K. Buchling ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

Flow boiling in microchannel heat sinks has been studied extensively in the past decade with the aim of implementation in the cooling of high-power integrated circuit chips. It has the potential to provide high-heat flux cooling at low wall superheats and a compact heater surface geometry. Prior works using water as the working fluid have shown that open microchannels with tapered manifolds deliver enhanced flow boiling performance, with substantial improvements in flow stability and a low pressure drop. The present work investigates the use of ethanol in flow boiling via a gravity-driven flow loop, eliminating the need for a pump. The flow boiling performance, critical heat flux (CHF) behavior, and pressure drop characteristics of ethanol in open microchannels with tapered gap manifolds (OMM) are studied. Several microchannel chips with different manifold gap heights and channel geometries are tested at multiple flow rates. The performance of ethanol in the present work was found to exceed all previously published results with ethanol, with a record maximum heat flux of 217 W/cm2 at a wall superheat of 34°C. Thanks to a remarkably low pressure drop, with maximal values below 9 kPa, ethanol is identified as a suitable dielectric fluid for reaching high heat flux goals in a gravity-driven configuration investigated in this study.

2015 ◽  
Vol 138 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Buchling ◽  
Satish Kandlikar

There is a clear need for cooling high heat flux generating electronic devices using a dielectric fluid without using a pump. This paper explores the feasibility of employing ethanol as a dielectric fluid in a horizontal, open microchannel heat sink configuration with a tapered gap manifold to yield very low pressure head requirements. The paper presents experimental results for such a system utilizing ethanol as a working fluid under gravity-driven flow. A heat flux of 217 W/cm2 was dissipated with a pressure drop of only 9 kPa. The paper further presents parametric trends regarding flow rate and pressure drop characteristics that provide basic insight into designing high heat flux systems under a given gravity head requirement. Based on the results, interrelationships and design guidelines are developed for the taper, ethanol flow rate and imposed heat flux on heat transfer coefficient and gravity head requirement for electronics cooling. Reducing flow instability, reducing pressure drop, and enhancing heat transfer performance for a dielectric fluid will enable the development of pumpless cooling solutions in a variety of electronics cooling applications.


Author(s):  
Hailei Wang ◽  
Richard Peterson

Flow boiling and heat transfer enhancement in four parallel microchannels using a dielectric working fluid, HFE 7000, was investigated. Each channel was 1000 μm wide and 510 μm high. A unique channel surface enhancement technique via diffusion bonding a layer of conductive fine wire mesh onto the heating wall was developed. According to the obtained flow boiling curves for both the bare and mesh channels, the amount of wall superheat was significantly reduced for the mesh channel at all stream-wise locations. This indicated that the nucleate boiling in the mesh channel was enhanced due to the increase of nucleation sites the mesh introduced. Both the nucleate boiling dominated and convective evaporation dominated regimes were identified. In addition, the overall trend for the flow boiling heat transfer coefficient, with respect to vapor quality, was increasing until the vapor quality reached approximately 0.4. The critical heat flux (CHF) for the mesh channel was also significantly higher than that of the bare channel in the low vapor quality region. Due to the fact of how the mesh was incorporated into the channels, no pressure drop penalty was identified for the mesh channels. Potential applications for this kind of mesh channel include high heat-flux electronic cooling systems and various energy conversion systems.


Author(s):  
Ankit Kalani ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

Flow boiling with microchannel can dissipate high heat fluxes at low surface temperature difference. A number of issues, such as instabilities, low critical heat flux (CHF) and low heat transfer coefficients, have prevented it from reaching its full potential. A new design incorporating open microchannels with uniform and tapered manifold (OMM) was shown to mitigate these issues successfully. Distilled, degassed water at 80 mL/min is used as the working fluid. Plain and open microchannel surfaces are used as the test sections. Heat transfer and pressure drop performance for uniform and tapered manifold with both the surfaces are discussed. A low pressure drop of 7.5 kPa is obtained with tapered manifold and microchannel chip at a heat flux of 263 W/cm2 without reaching CHF. The pressure drop data is further compared with the homogenous model and the initial results are presented.


Author(s):  
Ankit Kalani ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

Flow boiling in microchannels has the ability to dissipate high heat fluxes due to the associated small hydraulic diameter and latent heat effects. However, flow instabilities and early critical heat flux have often limited the heat transfer performance of such systems. In a previous study, the open microchannel with manifold (OMM) design was introduced to address these issues. Low pressure drop at high heat flux were obtained with this configuration. In this work, theoretical modeling of pressure drop for the OMM geometry with a uniform and a tapered manifold is undertaken. Applicability of the homogeneous model is evaluated using seven different viscosity averaging schemes. Experiments were performed with two test sections (one plain and one with open microchannels) and with four different manifolds (one uniform and three tapered). All experimental data with various configurations were compared with the different viscosity models. The viscosity model of Owen et al. predicted the highest value of pressure drop, while the lowest value was obtained with that of Dukler et al. All models underpredicted for uniform manifold with plain and microchannel chips with an average MAE of 50%. For tapered manifolds, plain chip underpredicted, while good agreement was obtained with microchannel chip for McAdams et al. and Akers et al.


Author(s):  
Behnam Parizad Benam ◽  
Abdolali Khalili Sadaghiani ◽  
Vedat Yağcı ◽  
Murat Parlak ◽  
Khellil Sefiane ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji Hwan Lim ◽  
Minkyu Park

Abstract The onset of nucleate boiling (ONB) is the point at which the heat transfer mechanism in fluids changes and is one of the thermo-hydraulic factors that must be considered when establishing a cooling system operation strategy. Because the high heat flux of several MW/m2, which is loaded within a tokamak, is applied under a one-side heating condition, it is necessary to determine a correlative relation that can predict ONB under special heating conditions. In this study, the ONB of a one-side-heated screw tube was experimentally analyzed via a subcooled flow boiling experiment. The helical nut structure of the screw tube flow path wall allows for improved heat transfer performance relative to smooth tubes, providing a screw tube with a 53.98% higher ONB than a smooth tube. The effects of the system parameters on the ONB heat flux were analyzed based on the changes in the heat transfer mechanism, with the results indicating that the flow rate and degree of subcooling are proportional to the ONB heat flux because increasing these factors improves the forced convection heat transfer and increases the condensation rate, respectively. However, it was observed that the liquid surface tension and latent heat decrease as the pressure increases, leading to a decrease in the ONB heat flux. An evaluation of the predictive performance of existing ONB correlations revealed that most have high error rates because they were developed based on ONB experiments on micro-channels or smooth tubes and not under one-side high heat load conditions. To address this, we used dimensional analysis based on Python code to develop new ONB correlations that reflect the influence of system parameters.


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.


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