Thermal hydraulic performance of microchannel heat sink device

Abstract

The study of micro cooling heat transfer from a hot surface has been performed by using a device consisting of short micro channels. These devices have been developed by the Institute of Micro Process Engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The investigation was focusing mainly on the heat transfer and pressure drop problem for a single-phase flow device. The objective of this study is to achieve a compromise value of heat flux and pressure for short microchannel heat sink. An experimental rig has been developed, and a microchannel heat sink with microchannel dimensions of 800 μm width, 200 μm length and 100 μm height was tested to investigate the characteristics of the device. A simulation work has been performed using a simplified model from the actual device and was then validated with the experimental result. Further improvement has been carried out on the model and simulated to predict the most compromising value between heat fluxes, pressure drop and substrate temperature. The study has shown that the combination of multi-layer arrangements and 50 μm depth microchannels was able to increase the heat transfer rate of the device by 9.7% and decrease the pressure drop by 20%. This was achieved by using only single-phase flow and without the application of impingement jets or phase change process. The advantages of multilayer short microchannels were not only on the reduction of the pressure drop and increment of the heat transfer but also their suitability for many applications, besides the fact that they could be rearranged for small surface areas.