Heat Transfer Enhancement in Microchannels Incorporating Slanted Grooves

Author(s):  
Poh-Seng Lee ◽  
Chiang-Juay Teo

The ever-increasing density, speed, and power consumption of microelectronics has led to a rapid increase in the heat fluxes which need to be dissipated in order to ensure their stable and reliable operation. The shrinking dimensions of electronics devices, in parallel, have imposed severe space constraints on the volume available for the cooling solution, defining the need for innovative and highly effective compact cooling techniques. Microchannel heat sinks have the potential to satisfy these requirements. However, significant temperature variations across the chip persist for conventional single-pass parallel flow microchannel heat sinks since the heat transfer performance deteriorates in the flow direction in microchannels as the boundary layers thicken and the coolant heats up. To accommodate higher heat fluxes, enhanced microchannel designs are needed. The present work presents an idea to enhance the single-phase convective heat transfer in microchannels. The proposed technique is passive, and does not require additional energy to be expended to enhance the heat transfer. The idea incorporates the generation of a spanwise or secondary flow to enhance mixing and hence decrease fluid temperature gradients across the microchannel. Slanted grooves can be created on the microchannel wall to induce the flow to twist and rotate thus introducing an additional component to the otherwise laminar flow in the microchannel. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of such an enhanced microchannel heat sink. The heat transfer was found to increase by up to 12% without incurring substantial additional pressure drops.


Author(s):  
Amy Rachel Betz ◽  
Daniel Attinger

Liquid cooling is an efficient way to remove heat fluxes with magnitude of 1 to 10,000 W/cm2. One limitation of current single-phase microchannel heat sinks is the relatively low Nusselt number, because of laminar flow. In this work, we experimentally investigate how to enhance the Nusselt number in the laminar regime with the periodic injection of non-condensable bubbles in a water-filled array of microchannels in a segmented flow pattern. We designed a polycarbonate heat sink consisting of an array of parallel microchannels with a low ratio of heat to convective resistance, to facilitate the measurement of the Nusselt Number. Our heat transfer and pressure drop measurements are in good agreement with existing correlations, and show that the Nusselt number of a segmented flow is increased by more than a hundred percent over single-phase flow provided the mass velocity is within a given range.



2020 ◽  
Vol 142 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ki Wook Jung ◽  
Eunho Cho ◽  
Hyoungsoon Lee ◽  
Chirag Kharangate ◽  
Feng Zhou ◽  
...  

Abstract High performance and economically viable cooling solutions must be developed to reduce weight and volume, allowing for a wide-spread utilization of hybrid electric vehicles. The traditional embedded microchannel cooling heat sinks suffer from high pressure drop due to small channel dimensions and long flow paths in two-dimensional (2D) plane. Utilizing direct “embedded cooling” strategy in combination with top access three-dimensional (3D) manifold strategy reduces the pressure drop by nearly an order of magnitude. In addition, it provides more temperature uniformity across large area chips and it is less prone to flow instability in two-phase boiling heat transfer. This study presents the experimental results for single-phase thermofluidic performance of an embedded silicon microchannel cold plate (CP) bonded to a 3D manifold for heat fluxes up to 300 W/cm2 using single-phase R-245fa. The heat exchanger consists of a 5 × 5 mm2 heated area with 25 parallel 75 × 150 μm2 microchannels, where the fluid is distributed by a 3D-manifold with four microconduits of 700 × 250 μm2. Heat is applied to the silicon heat sink using electrical Joule-heating in a metal serpentine bridge and the heated surface temperature is monitored in real-time by infrared (IR) camera and electrical resistance thermometry. The maximum and average temperatures of the chip, pressure drop, thermal resistance, and average heat transfer coefficient (HTC) are reported for flow rates of 0.1, 0.2. 0.3, and 0.37 L/min and heat fluxes from 25 to 300 W/cm2. The proposed embedded microchannels-3D manifold cooler, or EMMC, device is capable of removing 300 W/cm2 at maximum temperature 80 °C with pressure drop of less than 30 kPa, where the flow rate, inlet temperature, and pressures are 0.37 L/min, 25 °C and 350 kPa, respectively. The experimental uncertainties of the test results are estimated, and the uncertainties are the highest for heat fluxes < 50 W/cm2 due to difficulty in precisely measuring the fluid temperature at the inlet and outlet of the microcooler.



Author(s):  
Ki Wook Jung ◽  
Hyoungsoon Lee ◽  
Chirag Kharangate ◽  
Feng Zhou ◽  
Mehdi Asheghi ◽  
...  

Abstract High performance and economically viable thermal cooling solutions must be developed to reduce weight and volume, allowing for a wide-spread utilization of hybrid electric vehicles. The traditional embedded microchannel cooling heat sinks suffer from high pressure drop due to small channel dimensions and long flow paths in 2D-plane. Utilizing direct “embedded cooling” strategy in combination with top access 3D-manifold strategy reduces the pressure drop by nearly an order of magnitude. In addition, it provides more temperature uniformity across large area chips and it is less prone to flow instability in two-phase boiling heat transfer. Here, we present the experimental results for single-phase thermofluidic performance of an embedded silicon microchannel cold-plate bonded to a 3D manifold for heat fluxes up to 300 W/cm2 using single-phase R-245fa. The heat exchanger consists of a 52 mm2 heated area with 25 parallel 75 × 150 μm2 microchannels, where the fluid is distributed by a 3D-manifold with 4 micro-conduits of 700 × 250 μm2. Heat is applied to the silicon heat sink using electrical Joule-heating in a metal serpentine bridge and the heated surface temperature is monitored in real-time by Infra-red (IR) camera and electrical resistance thermometry. The experimental results for maximum and average temperatures of the chip, pressure drop, thermal resistance, average heat transfer coefficient for flow rates of 0.1, 0.2. 0.3 and 0.37 lit/min and heat fluxes from 25 to 300 W/cm2 are reported. The proposed Embedded Microchannels-3D Manifold Cooler, or EMMC, device is capable of removing 300 W/cm2 at maximum temperature 80 °C with pressure drop of less than 30 kPa, where the flow rate, inlet temperature and pressures are 0.37 lit/min, 25 °C and 350 kPa, respectively. The experimental uncertainties of the test results are estimated, and the uncertainties are the highest for heat fluxes < 50 W/cm2 due to difficulty in precisely measuring the fluid temperature at the inlet and outlet of the micro-cooler.



Author(s):  
Ahmed Eltaweel ◽  
Abdulla Baobeid ◽  
Ibrahim Hassan

Non-uniform heat fluxes are commonly observed in thermo-electronic devices that require distinct thermal management strategies for effective heat dissipation and robust performance. The limited research available on non-uniform heat fluxes focus mostly on microchannel heat sinks while the fundamental component, i.e. a single microchannel, has received restricted attention. In this work, an experimental setup for the analysis of variable axial heat flux is used to study the heat transfer in a single microchannel with fully developed flow under the effect of different heat flux profiles. Initially a hot spot at different locations, with a uniform background heat flux, is studied at different Reynolds numbers while varying the maximum heat fluxes in order to compute the heat transfer in relation to its dependent variables. Measurements of temperature, pressure, and flow rates at a different locations and magnitudes of hot spot heat fluxes are presented, followed by a detailed analysis of heat transfer characteristics of a single microchannel under non-uniform heating. Results showed that upstream hotspots have lower tube temperatures compared to downstream ones with equal amounts of heat fluxes. This finding can be of importance in enhancing microchannel heat sinks effectiveness in reducing maximum wall temperatures for the same amount of heat released, by redistributing spatially fluxes in a descending profile.



Author(s):  
Eric D. Truong ◽  
Erfan Rasouli ◽  
Vinod Narayanan

A combined experimental and computational fluid dynamics study of single-phase liquid nitrogen flow through a microscale pin-fin heat sink is presented. Such cryogenic heat sinks find use in applications such as high performance computing and spacecraft thermal management. A circular pin fin heat sink in diameter 5 cm and 250 micrometers in depth was studied herein. Unique features of the heat sink included its variable cross sectional area in the flow direction, variable pin diameters, as well as a circumferential distribution of fluid into the pin fin region. The stainless steel heat sink was fabricated using chemical etching and diffusion bonding. Experimental results indicate that the heat transfer coefficients were relatively unchanged around 2600 W/m2-K for flow rates ranging from 2–4 g/s while the pressure drop increased monotonically with the flow rate. None of the existing correlations in literature on cross flow over a tube bank or micro pin fin heat sinks were able to predict the experimental pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics. However, three dimensional simulations performed using ANSYS Fluent showed reasonable (∼7 percent difference) agreement in the average heat transfer coefficients between experiments and CFD simulations.



Author(s):  
Ahmed Eltaweel ◽  
Ibrahim Hassan

Abstract Nonuniform heat fluxes are commonly observed in thermo-electronic devices that require distinct thermal management strategies for effective heat dissipation and robust performance. The limited research available on nonuniform heat fluxes focus mostly on microchannel heat sinks while the fundamental component, i.e., a single microchannel, has received restricted attention. In this work, an experimental setup for the analysis of variable axial heat flux is used to study the heat transfer in a single microchannel with fully developed flow under the effect of different heat flux profiles. Initially, a hot spot at different locations, with a uniform background heat flux, is studied at different Reynolds numbers, while varying the maximum heat fluxes in order to compute the heat transfer in relation to its dependent variables. Measurements of temperature, pressure, and flow rates at a different locations and magnitudes of hot spot heat fluxes are presented, followed by a detailed analysis of heat transfer characteristics of a single microchannel under nonuniform heating. Results showed that upstream hotspots have lower tube temperatures compared to downstream ones with equal amounts of heat fluxes. This finding can be of importance in enhancing microchannel heat sinks effectiveness in reducing maximum wall temperatures for the same amount of heat released, by redistributing spatially fluxes in a descending profile.



Author(s):  
Himanshu Pokharna ◽  
Kuroda Masahiro ◽  
Eric DiStefano ◽  
Rajiv Mongia ◽  
Jim Barry ◽  
...  

Remote cooling is the established cooling scheme in notebook computers, and increasingly, other computing sectors like desktops and servers are evaluating this approach as an option for cooling future platforms. While remote cooling facilitates a larger heat exchanger than the space directly over the processor would allow, it introduces an additional thermal resistance, in particular, θp-f (plate to fluid resistance) — the resistance in getting the heat from the cold plate to the fluid. For any remote cooling system, this resistance needs to be carefully evaluated and minimized. Pumped fluid loops incorporating microchannel heat exchangers are a viable option to achieve low plate-to-fluid resistances. In this paper we will identify a reasonable target for θp-f and subsequently describe two similar but fundamentally different thermal systems to accomplish this target performance: single-phase and two-phase pumped loops. Although two phase flows are traditionally thought of as the way to accomplish the highest heat transfer coefficients and thus the lowest resistances, with microchannel heat sinks the contrast is not so acute. We will present results from our experimental work on single- and two-phase heat transfer from microchannel heat sinks and demonstrate a transition where single-phase performance matches that of two-phase operation. This will be followed by the analysis methods used to predict the heat transfer and the pressure drop data. Moreover, we will discuss system level issues and other hurdles that need to be overcome in commercialization of microchannel technology for cooling computer systems.



Author(s):  
Suresh V. Garimella ◽  
Vishal Singhal

Microchannel heat sinks are widely regarded as being amongst the most effective heat removal techniques from space-constrained electronic devices. However, the fluid flow and heat transfer in microchannels is not fully understood. The pumping requirements for flow through microchannels are also very high and none of the micropumps in the literature are truly suitable for this application. A wide-ranging research program on microchannel heat sinks and micropumps is underway in the Electronics Cooling Laboratory at Purdue University. This article provides an overview of the research being conducted to understand fluid flow and heat transfer in microchannels and to identify pumping requirements and suitable mechanisms for pumping in microchannels.



Author(s):  
Chengyun Xin ◽  
Jianhua Wang ◽  
Jianheng Xie ◽  
Yuee Song

Microchannel heat sinks have demonstrated the ability to dissipate large amounts of heat flux. This ability can be strongly enhanced by phase change of a liquid coolant. This paper numerically simulates the processes of liquid coolant flow, heat absorption and phase change within a microchannel, which is heated at one side by given heat fluxes. The two-phase flow model widely used in the investigations on heat and mass transfer within porous media is firstly introduced into microchannnel heat sinks by this paper. Experiential equations of the heat transfer coefficients in single phase and boiling region within microchannels are employed to calculate the convective heat exchange between solid wall and flowing fluid by an iterative process. The numerical results of pressure and temperature distributions obtained at different conditions are exhibited and analyzed. The results indicated that the trends predicted by this approach agree well with the previous references. Therefore the modeling is validated in some sense. At the same time, two phenomena, countercurrent flow in two-phase region and special pressure variations near the transition point, are exhibited.



2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-98
Author(s):  
Pradeep Hegde ◽  
K.N. Seetharamu

Numerical investigations with regard to the thermal characteristics of water cooled single stack and multistack microchannel heat sinks subjected to nonuniform base heating are conducted. Nonuniformities in base heating are accomplished by applying gradually increasing and gradually decreasing base heat fluxes with respect to coolant flow direction in the heat sink. The effects of heat concentration upstream, downstream, and in the center half of the microchannel heat sinks (similar to a hotspot) are also studied. Both parallel flow and counter coolant flow conditions in the heat sink are considered and the results are compared. The results are presented in the form of base temperature distribution and heat sink thermal resistance. The finite element method is used for the analysis.



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