Numerical Study of Turbulent Heat Transfer and Pressure Drop Characteristics in a Water-Cooled Minichannel Heat Sink

2006 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
X. L. Xie ◽  
W. Q. Tao ◽  
Y. L. He

With the rapid development of the Information Technology (IT) industry, the heat flux in integrated circuit (IC) chips cooled by air has almost reached its limit at about 100W∕cm2. Some applications in high technology industries require heat fluxes well beyond such a limitation. Therefore, the search for a more efficient cooling technology becomes one of the bottleneck problems of the further development of the IT industry. The microchannel flow geometry offers a large surface area of heat transfer and a high convective heat transfer coefficient. However, it has been hard to implement because of its very high pressure head required to pump the coolant fluid through the channels. A normal channel size could not give high heat flux, although the pressure drop is very small. A minichannel can be used in a heat sink with quite a high heat flux and a mild pressure loss. A minichannel heat sink with bottom size of 20mm×20mm is analyzed numerically for the single-phase turbulent flow of water as a coolant through small hydraulic diameters. A constant heat flux boundary condition is assumed. The effect of channel dimensions, channel wall thickness, bottom thickness, and inlet velocity on the pressure drop, temperature difference, and maximum allowable heat flux are presented. The results indicate that a narrow and deep channel with thin bottom thickness and relatively thin channel wall thickness results in improved heat transfer performance with a relatively high but acceptable pressure drop. A nearly optimized structure of heat sink is found that can cool a chip with heat flux of 350W∕cm2 at a pumping power of 0.314W.

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):  
Kazuhisa Yuki ◽  
Akira Matsui ◽  
Hidetoshi Hashizume ◽  
Koichi Suzuki

Heat transfer characteristics of micro-sized bronze particle-sintered porous heat sinks and copper minichannel-fins heat sinks are experimentally investigated in order to clarify the feasibility of a newly proposed micro/mini cooling device using fins-installed porous media. Regarding the porous heat sinks, fin effect toward more inside of the porous medium is promoted by sintering the porous heat sink on the heat transfer surface, which results in increasing the heat transfer performance up to 0.8MW/m2K at heat flux of 8.2MW/m2 though there still remains a large pressure loss issue. In addition, the results clarify that the heat exchanging area exists only in the vicinity of the heat transfer surface. As to the minichannel-fins heat sinks, the influence of the channel width and the fin thickness are evaluated in detail. As a result, the minichannel-fins heat sink having the narrower channel width (i.e. scale effect) and lower porosity (i.e. thicker fin thickness with larger heat capacity) achieves higher heat transfer performance up to 0.10MW/m2K at 8.3MW/m2. However, rapid increase of pressure loss, which is occasionally observed in a microchannel due to vapor bubbles choking the narrow channel, still remains as an issue under flow boiling conditions in the minichannel. Finally, heat transfer performance of the fin-installed porous heat sink is numerically predicted by the control volume method. The simulation confirms that the heat transfer coefficient at each wall superheat of 0 and 30 degrees has performance 2.5 times and 2.0 times higher than that of the normal fins, which indicates that this heat sink coupling the micro and mini channels has high potential as efficient cooling method under high heat flux conditions exceeding 10MW/m2.


Author(s):  
Mark T. North ◽  
Wei-Lin Cho

An advanced heat sinking technology is described in which heat is dissipated by flowing the liquid coolant through a matrix of well-bonded metallic particles. This porous metal heat sink has the capability to dissipate heat flux of 500W/cm2 or more with a unit area thermal resistance of 0.1°C·cm2/W. The construction of one incarnation of this class of heat sink developed for cooling of a high-power stack of laser diode arrays is described. Tradeoffs between pressure drop and thermal resistance are identified with regard to particle size and other geometric parameters. The patented manifolding geometry allows the cooling area to be scaled up without significantly increasing the overall pressure drop. Experimental data showing thermal resistance and pressure drop at a variety of different water flow rates is also presented. Applications for this technology can include cooling of laser diode arrays and high power electronic components such as CPUs.


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