High Heat Flux Phase Change on Silicon Wick Structures

Author(s):  
Qingjun Cai ◽  
Avijit Bhunia ◽  
Yuan Zhao

Silicon is the major material in IC manufacture. It has high thermal conductivity and is compatible with precision micro-fabrication. It also has decent thermal expansion coefficient to most semiconductor materials. These characteristics make it an ideally underlying material for fabricating micro/mini heat pipes and their wick structures. In this paper, we focus our research investigations on high heat flux phase change capacity of the silicon wick structures. The experimental wick sample is composed of silicon pillars 320μm in height and 30 ∼ 100μm in diameter. In a stainless steel test chamber, synchronized visualizations and measurements are performed to crosscheck experimental phenomena and data. Using the mono-wick structure with large silicon pillar of 100μm in diameter, the phase change on the silicon wick structure reaches its maximum heat flux at 1,130W/cm2 over a 2mm×2mm heating area. The wick structure can fully utilize the wick pump capability to supply liquid from all 360° directions to the center heating area. In contrast, the large heating area and fine silicon pillars 10μm in diameter significantly reduces liquid transport capability and suppresses generation of nucleate boiling. As a result, phase change completely relies on evaporation, and the CHF of the wick structure is reduced to 180W/cm2. An analytical model based on high heat flux phase change of mono-porous wick structures indicates that heat transfer capability is subjected to the ratio between the wick particle radius and the heater dimensions, as well as vapor occupation ratio of the porous volume. In contrast, phase change heat transfer coefficients of the wick structures essentially reflect material properties of wick structure and mechanism of two-phase interactions within wick structures.

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.


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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bharath Ramakrishnan ◽  
Yaser Hadad ◽  
Sami Alkharabsheh ◽  
Paul R. Chiarot ◽  
Bahgat Sammakia

Data center energy usage keeps growing every year and will continue to increase with rising demand for ecommerce, scientific research, social networking, and use of streaming video services. The miniaturization of microelectronic devices and an increasing demand for clock speed result in high heat flux systems. By adopting direct liquid cooling, the high heat flux and high power demands can be met, while the reliability of the electronic devices is greatly improved. Cold plates which are mounted directly on to the chips facilitate a lower thermal resistance path originating from the chip to the incoming coolant. An attempt was made in the current study to characterize a commercially available cold plate which uses warm water in carrying the heat away from the chip. A mock package mimicking a processor chip with an effective heat transfer area of 6.45 cm2 was developed for this study using a copper block heater arrangement. The thermo-hydraulic performance of the cold plates was investigated by conducting experiments at varying chip power, coolant flow rates, and coolant temperature. The pressure drop (ΔP) and the temperature rise (ΔT) across the cold plates were measured, and the results were presented as flow resistance and thermal resistance curves. A maximum heat flux of 31 W/cm2 was dissipated at a flow rate of 13 cm3/s. A resistance network model was used to calculate an effective heat transfer coefficient by revealing different elements contributing to the total resistance. The study extended to different coolant temperatures ranging from 25 °C to 45 °C addresses the effect of coolant viscosity on the overall performance of the cold plate, and the results were presented as coefficient of performance (COP) curves. A numerical model developed using 6SigmaET was validated against the experimental findings for the flow and thermal performance with minimal percentage difference.


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):  
Nihal E. Joshua ◽  
Denesh K. Ajakumar ◽  
Huseyin Bostanci

This study experimentally investigated the effect of hydrophobic patterned surfaces in nucleate boiling heat transfer. A dielectric liquid, HFE-7100, was used as the working fluid in the saturated boiling tests. Dielectric liquids are known to have highly-wetting characteristics. They tend to fill surface cavities that would normally trap vapor/gas, and serve as active nucleation sites during boiling. With the lack of these vapor filled cavities, boiling of a dielectric liquid leads to high incipience superheats and accompanying temperature overshoots. Heater samples in this study were prepared by applying a thin Teflon (AF400, Dupont) coating on 1-cm2 smooth copper surfaces following common photolithography techniques. Matching size thick film resistors, attached onto the copper samples, generated heat and simulated high heat flux electronic devices. Tests investigated the heater samples featuring circular pattern sizes between 40–100 μm, and corresponding pitch sizes between 80–200 μm. Additionally, a plain, smooth copper surface was tested to obtain reference data. Based on data, hydrophobic patterned surfaces effectively eliminated the temperature overshoot at boiling incipience, and considerably improved nucleate boiling performance in terms of heat transfer coefficient and critical heat flux over the reference surface. Hydrophobic patterned surfaces therefore demonstrated a practical surface modification method for heat transfer enhancement in immersion cooling applications.


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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Satish G. Kandlikar ◽  
Theodore Widger ◽  
Ankit Kalani ◽  
Valentina Mejia

Flow boiling in microchannels has been extensively studied in the past decade. Instabilities, low critical heat flux (CHF) values, and low heat transfer coefficients have been identified as the major shortcomings preventing its implementation in practical high heat flux removal systems. A novel open microchannel design with uniform and tapered manifolds (OMM) is presented to provide stable and highly enhanced heat transfer performance. The effects of the gap height and flow rate on the heat transfer performance have been experimentally studied with water. The critical heat fluxes (CHFs) and heat transfer coefficients obtained with the OMM are significantly higher than the values reported by previous researchers for flow boiling with water in microchannels. A record heat flux of 506 W/cm2 with a wall superheat of 26.2 °C was obtained for a gap size of 0.127 mm. The CHF was not reached due to heater power limitation in the current design. A maximum effective heat transfer coefficient of 290,000 W/m2 °C was obtained at an intermediate heat flux of 319 W/cm2 with a gap of 0.254 mm at 225 mL/min. The flow boiling heat transfer was found to be insensitive to flow rates between 40–333 mL/min and gap sizes between 0.127–1.016 mm, indicating the dominance of nucleate boiling. The OMM geometry is promising to provide exceptional performance that is particularly attractive in meeting the challenges of high heat flux removal in electronics cooling applications.


Author(s):  
Qingjun Cai ◽  
Chung-Lung Chen ◽  
Guangyong Xiong ◽  
Zhifeng Ren

Multiwall carbon nanotube (MCNT) has high thermal conductivity, nano size pores and high capillary pressure. All these physical properties make it an ideal candidate as a wick structure in a micro sized heat pipe/spreader. In this paper, experimental investigations evaluate heat transfer performance of the carbon nanotube (CNT) wick and demonstrate its ability to handle high heat flux cooling. The CNT wick structure used for high heat flux experiments employs the bi-wick structure design to overcome high flow resistance in CNT clusters. The wick fabrication technique integrates both microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) patterning and thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) CNT growth processes. In high heat flux experiments, the CNT cluster functions as the first order wick structure and provides a large capillary force. The spacing among CNT clusters acts as the second order wick structure thus setting up low resistance liquid supply channels and vapor ventilation paths. Preliminary experiments are conducted in an open chamber system with vertical CNT bi-wick sample setup. Heat flux, as high as 400W/cm2, is demonstrated over 0.16mm2 heating area. Dryout was not observed, whereas the heater soft-bonding material fails at the higher testing heat flux. The experimental results indicate that the CNT bi-wick structure is capable of high heat flux cooling and promises to be the heat transfer element in new generation microelectronics cooling systems.


Author(s):  
Aranya Chauhan ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

Abstract The trend of miniaturization in electronics presents a great challenge in the thermal management of devices. The continuous increase in the number of transistors in the processor leads to high heat flux generation, limiting the performance of the device. Boiling heat transfer offers a great heat removal competency while maintaining the low chip temperatures. The critical heat flux (CHF) dictates the maximum heat removal ability, and heat transfer coefficient (HTC) defines the efficiency of the boiling process. This pool boiling study is focused on using a manifold containing a symmetric dual taper over the heating surface. The heat transfer performance of this configuration is evaluated for different taper angles in the manifold. The macro-convection assisted by vapor columns during boiling enhance the CHF and HTC limit significantly. A CHF of 287 W/cm2 with an HTC of 116 kW/cm2°C was achieved with a plain copper surface, representing greater than a 2-fold increases in each over a plain surface.


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