Enhanced Flow Boiling Using Radial Open Microchannels With Manifold and Offset Strip Fins

2017 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Recinella ◽  
Satish G. Kandlikar

The increasing demand for designing effective cooling solutions in high power density electronic components has resulted in exploring advanced thermal management strategies. Over the past decade, phase-change cooling has received widespread recognition due to its ability to dissipate large heat fluxes while maintaining low temperature differences. In this paper, a radial flow boiling configuration through a central inlet was studied. This configuration is particularly suited for chip cooling application. Two heat transfer surfaces with (a) radial microchannels, and (b) offset strip fins were fabricated and their flow boiling performance with distilled water was obtained. Furthermore, the effect of the liquid flow rate on the boiling performance and enhancement mechanisms was also investigated in this study. At a flow rate of 240 mL/min, a maximum heat flux of 369 W/cm2 at a wall superheat of 49 °C and a pressure drop of 59 kPa was achieved with the radial microchannels, while the offset strip fins achieved a maximum heat flux of 618 W/cm2 at a wall superheat of 20 °C. Increasing the flow rate to 320 mL/min resulted in a heat flux of 897 W/cm2 demonstrating the potential of using a radial configuration for enhancing the boiling performance. The increase in flow cross-sectional area was shown to be responsible for the reduced pressure drop when compared to straight microchannel configurations. The high-speed imaging incorporated in each test provided valuable insight and understanding into the flow patterns and underlying mechanism in these geometries. With the ease of implementation, highly stable flow, and further optimization possibilities with different microchannel and taper configurations, the radial geometry is expected to provide significant performance enhancement well beyond a critical heat flux (CHF) of 1 kW/cm2.

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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tailian Chen ◽  
Suresh V. Garimella

The cooling capacity of two-phase transport in microchannels is limited by the occurrence of critical heat flux (CHF). Due to the nature of the phenomenon, it is challenging to obtain reliable CHF data without causing damage to the device under test. In this work, the critical heat fluxes for flow boiling of FC-77 in a silicon thermal test die containing 60 parallel microchannels were measured at five total flow rates through the microchannels in the range of 20–80 ml/min. CHF is caused by dryout at the wall near the exit of the microchannels, which in turn is attributed to the flow reversal upstream of the microchannels. The bubbles pushed back into the inlet plenum agglomerate; the resulting flow blockage is a likely cause for the occurrence of CHF which is marked by an abrupt increase in wall temperature near the exit and an abrupt decrease in pressure drop across the microchannels. A database of 49 data points obtained from five experiments in four independent studies with water, R-113, and FC-77 as coolants was compiled and analyzed. It is found that the CHF has a strong dependence on the coolant, the flow rate, and the area upon which the heat flux definition is based. However, at a given flow rate, the critical heat input (total heat transfer rate to the coolant when CHF occurs) depends only on the coolant and has minimal dependence on the details of the microchannel heat sink (channel size, number of channels, substrate material, and base area). The critical heat input for flow boiling in multiple parallel microchannels follows a well-defined trend with the product of mass flow rate and latent heat of vaporization. A power-law correlation is proposed which offers a simple, yet accurate method for predicting the CHF. The thermodynamic exit quality at CHF is also analyzed and discussed to provide insights into the CHF phenomenon in a heat sink containing multiple parallel microchannels.


Author(s):  
Farzad Houshmand ◽  
Hyoungsoon Lee ◽  
Mehdi Asheghi ◽  
Kenneth E. Goodson

As the proper cooling of the electronic devices leads to significant increase in the performance, two-phase heat transfer to dielectric liquids can be of an interest especially for thermal management solutions for high power density devices with extremely high heat fluxes. In this paper, the pressure drop and critical heat flux (CHF) for subcooled flow boiling of methanol at high heat fluxes exceeding 1 kW/cm2 is investigated. Methanol was propelled into microtubes (ID = 265 and 150 μm) at flow rates up to 40 ml/min (mass fluxes approaching 10000 kg/m2-s), boiled in a portion of the microtube by passing DC current through the walls, and the two-phase pressure drop and CHF were measured for a range of operating parameters. The two-phase pressure drop for subcooled flow boiling was found to be significantly lower than the saturated flow boiling case, which can lead to lower pumping powers and more stability in the cooling systems. CHF was found to be increasing almost linearly with Re and inverse of inner diameter (1/ID), while for a given inner diameter, it decreases with increasing heated length.


2006 ◽  
Vol 128 (12) ◽  
pp. 1302-1311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camil-Daniel Ghiu ◽  
Yogendra K. Joshi

An experimental study of pool boiling using enhanced structures under top-confined conditions was conducted with a dielectric fluorocarbon liquid (PF 5060). The single layer enhanced structures studied were fabricated in copper and quartz, had an overall size of 10×10mm2, and were 1mm thick. The parameters investigated in this study were the heat flux (0.8-34W∕cm2) and the top space S(0-13mm). High-speed visualizations were performed to elucidate the liquid/vapor flow in the space above the structure. The enhancement observed for plain surfaces in the low heat fluxes regime is not present for the present enhanced structure. On the other hand, the maximum heat flux for a prescribed 85°C surface temperature limit increased with the increase of the top spacing, similar to the plain surfaces case. Two characteristic regimes of pool boiling have been identified and described: isolated flattened bubbles regime and coalesced bubbles regime.


Fractals ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (07) ◽  
pp. 1950111
Author(s):  
WEI YU ◽  
LUYAO XU ◽  
SHUNJIA CHEN ◽  
FENG YAO

A two-dimensional model is developed to numerically study the water flow boiling through a tree-shaped microchannel by VOF method. In this work, the bubble dynamics and flow patterns along the channel are examined. Additionally, the pressure drop, heat transfer performance and the effects of mass flow rate and heat flux on the heat transfer coefficient are analyzed and discussed. The numerical results indicate that, there are three main bubble dynamic behaviors at the wall, namely coalesce-lift-off, coalesce-slide and coalesce-reattachment. At the bifurcation in high branching level, the slug bubbles may coalesce or breakup. The flow patterns of bubbly, bubbly-slug flows occur at low branching level and slug flow occurs at high branching level. The passage of bubbles causes the increasing of fluid temperature and local pressure. Additionally, the pressure drop decreases with the branching level. The flow pattern and channel confinement effect play a vital role in heat transfer performance. The nucleate boiling dominant heat transfer is observed at low branching level, the heat transfer performance is enhanced with increasing branching level from [Formula: see text] to 2. While, at high branching level, the heat transfer performance becomes weaker due to the suppression of nucleate boiling. Moreover, the heat transfer coefficient increases with the mass flow rate and heat flux.


2016 ◽  
Vol 366 ◽  
pp. 151-156
Author(s):  
Bei Chen Zhang ◽  
Qing Lian Li ◽  
Yuan Wang ◽  
Jian Qiang Zhang

Two-phase pressure drop fluctuations during flow boiling in a single mini-channel were experimentally investigated. Degassed water was tested in circular cross section mini-channels with the hydraulic diameter of 1.0 mm at liquid mass fluxes range of 21.19-84.77 kg m-2 s-1 and heat fluxes of 0~155.75 kW m-2. Effects of heat flux and mass flux on pressure drop fluctuations were discussed based on the time and frequency domain analysis of the measured pressure drop. Two types of fluctuations were identified, which are the incipient boiling fluctuation (IBF) and the explosive boiling fluctuation (EBF) respectively. The IBF is a low frequency low amplitude fluctuation, which relates to the bubble dynamics when incipient boiling occurs. It is sensitive to the thermal and flow conditions. With the increase of heat flux and mass flux, the IBF is suppressed. The EBF is a low frequency high amplitude fluctuation, which occurs near the critical heat flux.


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

Flow boiling with microchannel can dissipate high heat fluxes at low surface temperature difference. A number of issues, such as instabilities, low critical heat flux (CHF) and low heat transfer coefficients, have prevented it from reaching its full potential. A new design incorporating open microchannels with uniform and tapered manifold (OMM) was shown to mitigate these issues successfully. Distilled, degassed water at 80 mL/min is used as the working fluid. Plain and open microchannel surfaces are used as the test sections. Heat transfer and pressure drop performance for uniform and tapered manifold with both the surfaces are discussed. A low pressure drop of 7.5 kPa is obtained with tapered manifold and microchannel chip at a heat flux of 263 W/cm2 without reaching CHF. The pressure drop data is further compared with the homogenous model and the initial results are presented.


Author(s):  
Daxiang Deng ◽  
Qingsong Huang ◽  
Yanlin Xie ◽  
Wei Zhou ◽  
Xiang Huang ◽  
...  

Two-phase boiling in advanced microchannel heat sinks offers an efficient and attractive solution for heat dissipation of high-heat-flux devices. In this study, a type of reentrant copper microchannels was developed for heat sink cooling systems. It consisted of 14 parallel Ω-shaped reentrant copper microchannels with a hydraulic diameter of 781μm. Two-phase pressure drop characteristics were comprehensively accessed via flow boiling tests. Both deionized water and ethanol tests were conducted at inlet subcooling of 10°C and 40°C, mass fluxes of 125–300kg/m2·s, and a wide range of heat fluxes and vapor qualities. The effects of heat flux, mass flux, inlet subcoolings and coolants on the two-phase pressure drop were systematically explored. The results show that the two-phase pressure drop of reentrant copper microchannels generally increased with increasing heat fluxes and vapor qualities. The role of mass flux and inlet temperatures was dependent on the test coolant. The water tests presented smaller pressure drop than the ethanol ones. These results provide critical experimental information for the development of microchannel heat sink cooling systems, and are of considerable practical relevance.


Author(s):  
J. A. Liburdy ◽  
D. V. Pence ◽  
V. Narayanan

This study evaluates flow instability and void fraction in a fractal-like branching microchannel network. The flow network is characterized by set branching ratios for channel length and width of 1/2 and 2, respectively, and features five branching levels. The hydraulic diameter of the channels ranged from 308μm at the inlet to 143μm at the outlet. Test were performed using water heated to an 88°C at the inlet with a mass flow rate of 10g/min. Heat fluxes of 1.76 W/cm2 and 2.64 W/cm2 were applied to the test device for the given flow rate. An upstream control valve was used to throttled the flow with a pressure drop approximately 100 times larger than the pressure drop across the test device. For the cases with and without throttling results for inlet pressure oscillation frequency and vapor activity at the inlet of the test device are compared. In addition, time averaged void fraction is compared for each branching level with and without throttling and is compared to predictions from a 1-D model. Results show good agreement between model and experiments for the average void fraction although local values differ significantly.


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