Enhanced Pool Boiling With Ethanol at Subatmospheric Pressures for Electronics Cooling

2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ankit Kalani ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

The growing trend in miniaturization of electronics has generated a need for efficient thermal management of these devices. Boiling has the ability to dissipate a high heat flux while maintaining a small temperature difference. A vapor chamber with pool boiling offers an effective way to provide cooling and to maintain temperature uniformity. The objective of the current work is to investigate pool boiling performance of ethanol on enhanced microchannel surfaces. Ethanol is an attractive working fluid due to its better heat transfer performance and higher heat of vaporization compared to refrigerants, and lower normal boiling point compared to water. The saturation temperature of ethanol can be further reduced to temperatures suitable for electronics cooling by lowering the pressure. Experiments were performed at four different absolute pressures, 101.3 kPa, 66.7 kPa, 33.3 kPa, and 16.7 kPa using different microchannel surface configurations. Heat dissipation in excess of 900 kW/m2 was obtained while maintaining the wall surface below 85 °C at 33 kPa. Flammability, toxicity, and temperature overshoot issues need to be addressed before practical implementation of ethanol-based cooling systems can occur.

Author(s):  
Maher Al-Baghdadi

Abstract Thermal management is essential in electronics, as it improves reliability and enhances performance by removing heat generated by the devices. Thermal management of handheld systems such as laptops is becoming increasingly challenging due to increasing power dissipation. The power dissipated per unit area on the laptop electronic chips is increasing while the area of the chips itself it decreasing, resulting a high heat flux that causes an increase in temperature. The increasing temperature adversely affects the performance of laptops and in many cases leads to failure through such modes as thermal fatigue and dielectric breakdown. In this work, three dimensional steady state CFD model of a laptop motherboard is presented. The model accounts for heat transfer for both natural convection and radiation to the ambient air temperature. The present CFD study allow accurate, rapid, physical modelling to make decisions on materials, components and layout beside power control feedback to achieve performance and target lifetime with reduced testing requirements. An alternative design for the cooling of laptop microprocessor using only passive cooling is proposed. The results showed that the assembled a thin plate of a copper material coated with graphene and use it as a heat sinks with the microprocessor of the laptop providing an efficient and economical solution in thermal management. Considerable drop in microprocessor temperature is obtained through the heat dissipation path suggested in the new design. The proposed passive cooling solution has the advantages of fanless operation compared to the existing active cooling solutions such as the noise-free operation, lower energy consumption and higher reliability. We hope this work may open the way for huge boost in the technology of electric cooling by innovative manufacturing techniques.


Micromachines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1080
Author(s):  
Wenzhe Song ◽  
Yanfeng Xu ◽  
Lihong Xue ◽  
Huajie Li ◽  
Chunsheng Guo

As a type of micro flat loop heat pipe, s-UTLHP (silicon-based ultra-thin loop heat pipe) is of great significance in the field of micro-scale heat dissipation. To prove the feasibility of s-UTLHP with high heat flux in a narrow space, it is necessary to study its heat transfer mechanism visually. In this paper, a structural design of s-UTLHP was proposed, and then, to realize the working fluid charging and visual experiment, an experimental system including a holding module, heating module, cooling module, data acquisition module, and vacuum chamber was proposed. Deionized water was selected as a working fluid in the experiment. The overall and micro phenomena of s-UTLHP during startup, as well as the evaporation and condensation phenomena of s-UTLHP during stable operation, were observed and analyzed. Finally, the failure phenomenon of s-UTLHP was analyzed, and several solutions were proposed. The observed phenomena and experimental conclusions can provide references for further related experimental research.


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

Two-phase cooling is considered an attractive option for electronics cooling due to its ability to dissipate large quantities of heat. In recent years, pool boiling has shown tremendous ability in high heat dissipation applications. Researchers have used various fluid medium for pool boiling including water, alcohol, refrigerants, nanofluids and binary mixture. In the current work, binary mixture of water with ethanol was chosen as the working fluid. Plain copper chip was used as the boiling surface. Effect of various concentrations of binary mixture was investigated. A maximum heat flux of 1720 kW/m2 at a wall superheat of 28°C was recorded for 15% ethanol in water. It showed a 1.5 fold increase in CHF over pure water.


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.


2008 ◽  
Vol 130 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiding Cao ◽  
Mingcong Gao

This paper conducts experimental and analytical studies of a novel heat-transfer device, reciprocating-mechanism driven heat loop (RMDHL) that facilitates two-phase heat transfer while eliminating the so-called cavitation problem commonly encountered by a conventional pump. A RMDHL normally includes a hollow loop having an interior flow passage, an amount of working fluid filled within the loop, and a reciprocating driver. The hollow loop has an evaporator section, a condenser section, and a liquid reservoir. The reciprocating driver is integrated with the liquid reservoir and facilitates a reciprocating flow of the working fluid within the loop, so that liquid is supplied from the condenser section to the evaporator section under a substantially saturated condition and the so-called cavitation problem associated with a conventional pump is avoided. The reciprocating driver could be a solenoid-operated reciprocating driver for electronics cooling applications and a bellows-type reciprocating driver for high-temperature applications. Experimental study has been undertaken for a solenoid-operated heat loop in connection with high heat flux thermal management applications. Experimental results show that the heat loop worked very effectively and a heat flux as high as 300W∕cm2 in the evaporator section could be handled. A working criterion has also been derived, which could provide a guidance for the design of a RMDHL.


Author(s):  
Farhad Saffaraval ◽  
Amir Jokar

The objective of this study is to experimentally explore thermodynamic performance of R245fa, as a low-pressure and environmentally-friendly refrigerant, in a microchannel heat exchanger. This heat exchanger is used in an electronics cooling application with high-power density. Due to the large amount of latent heat that is released during evaporation process, the two-phase microchannel coolers are able to remove much more energy compared to single-phase cooling systems. In this study, R245fa is used as the working fluid in a refrigeration pump loop that mainly includes an evaporator, a condenser, a refrigerant pump, and a pressure regulator valve. The goal is to obtain optimal mass flow rates and system pressures while the temperatures in evaporator and condenser are kept constant for specific conditions. The results obtained from this study are then compared to the results previously obtained for water as the working fluid in a similar cooling system. It is expected the evaporative cooling through the microchannel heat exchanger be a viable and effective solution, especially for higher heat flux applications.


2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian M. Fronk ◽  
Alexander S. Rattner

A novel thermal management approach is explored, which uses supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) as a working fluid to manage extreme heat fluxes in electronics cooling applications. In the pseudocritical region, sCO2 has extremely high volumetric thermal capacity, which can enable operation with low pumping requirements, and without the potential for two-phase critical heat flux (CHF) and flow instabilities. A model of a representative microchannel heat sink is evaluated with single-phase liquid water and FC-72, two-phase boiling R-134a, and sCO2. For a fixed pumping power, sCO2 is found to yield lower heat-sink wall temperatures than liquid coolants. Practical engineering challenges for supercritical thermal management systems are discussed, including the limits of predictive heat transfer models, narrow operating temperature ranges, high working pressures, and pump design criteria. Based on these findings, sCO2 is a promising candidate working fluid for cooling high heat flux electronics, but additional thermal transport research and engineering are needed before practical systems can be realized.


Author(s):  
Travis S. Emery ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

As the need for efficient thermal management grows, pool boiling’s ability to dissipate high heat fluxes has gained significant interest. The objective of this work was to study the performance of pool boiling at atmospheric pressure using a dielectric fluid, HFE7000. Both plain and enhanced copper surfaces were tested, and these results were then compared to similar testing performed with water and FC-87. The enhanced surfaces utilized microchannels with porous coatings selectively located on different regions of the heat transfer surface. A maximum critical heat flux (CHF) of 41.7 W/cm2 was achieved here, which translated to a 29% CHF increase in comparison to a plain chip. A maximum heat transfer coefficient (HTC) of 104.0 kW/m2°C was also achieved, which translated to a 6-fold increase in HTC when compared to a plain copper chip. More notably, this HTC was achieved at a wall temperature of 38.4 °C. This HTC enhancement was greater than that of water and FC-87 when using the same enhanced surface. The effect of sintering location was found to have a similar effect on CHF with HFE7000 in comparison with water. The effect of microchannel size was shown to have similar effects on CHF when compared with FC-87 and water. From the results found here, it is concluded that the employment of selectively sintered open microchannels with HFE7000 has significant potential for enhanced heat dissipation in electronics cooling applications.


Author(s):  
Mitchell P. Hoesing ◽  
Gregory J. Michna

The oscillating heat pipe (OHP) is a passive two-phase cooling device that is capable of transferring large amounts of thermal energy. Previous research conducted on OHPs indicates that it is a viable option for developing high-heat flux cooling requirements, particularly in the field of electronics cooling. OHPs consist of evaporator, adiabatic, and condenser sections connected by multiple interconnected meandering channels. A two-phase working fluid, in this study acetone, fills the channels and acts as the heat transfer medium. The focus of this study is to further the development of OHPs to improve performance and operation by conducting a comparison between two different evaporator geometries. The first was a traditional straight channel geometry. The second consisted of circular pins centered in the channels with circular cavities surrounding the pins to allow fluid flow. The results of this study showed that the traditional straight channel configuration preformed best. The lowest fill ratio, 35%, performed best for all cases. The lowest thermal resistance observed was 0.11 K/W for the straight channels, and 0.16 K/W for the enhanced channels. The enhanced channels likely did not improve the performance because of an increase in pressure drop through the evaporator section.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document