Stacked Microchannel Heat Sinks for Liquid Cooling of Microelectronic Components

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
X. Wei ◽  
Y. Joshi

Abstract A novel heat sink based on a multi-layer stack of liquid cooled microchannels is investigated. For a given pumping power and heat removal capability for the heat sink, the flow rate across a stack of microchannels is lower compared to a single layer of microchannels. Numerical simulations using a computationally efficient multigrid method [1] were carried out to investigate the detailed conjugate transport within the heat sink. The effects of the microchannel aspect ratio and total number of layers on thermal performance were studied for water as coolant. A heat sink of base area 10 mm by 10 mm with a height in the range 1.8 to 4.5 mm (2–5 layers) was considered with water flow rate in the range 0.83×10−6 m3/s (50 ml/min) to 6.67×10−6 m3/s (400 ml/min). The results of the computational simulations were also compared with a simplified thermal resistance network analysis.

2004 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaojin Wei ◽  
Yogendra Joshi

A novel heat sink based on a multilayer stack of liquid cooled microchannels is investigated. For a given pumping power and heat removal capability for the heat sink, the flow rate across a stack of microchannels is lower compared to a single layer of microchannels. Numerical simulations using a computationally efficient multigrid method [1] were carried out to investigate the detailed conjugate transport within the heat sink. The effects of the microchannel aspect ratio and total number of layers on thermal performance were studied for water as coolant. A heat sink of base area 10 mm by 10 mm with a height in the range 1.8 to 4.5 mm (2–5 layers) was considered with water flow rate in the range 0.83×10−6m3/s (50 ml/min) to 6.67×10−6m3/s (400 ml/min). The results of the computational simulations were also compared with a simplified thermal resistance network analysis.


Author(s):  
Yin Lam ◽  
Nicole Okamoto ◽  
Younes Shabany ◽  
Sang-Joon John Lee

Heat removal is an increasing engineering challenge for higher-density packaging of circuit components. Microchannel heat sinks with liquid cooling have been investigated to take advantage of high surface-to-volume ratio and higher heat capacity of liquids relative to gases. This study experimentally investigated heat removal by liquid cooling through shallow copperclad cavities with staggered pin-fin arrays. Cavities with pin-fins were fabricated by chemical etching of a copperclad layer (nominally 105 μm thick) on a printed-circuit substrate (FR-4). The overall etched cavity was 30 mm wide, 40 mm long, and 0.1 mm deep. The pins were 1.1 mm in diameter and were distributed in a staggered arrangement. The cavity was sealed with a second copperclad substrate using an elastomer gasket. This assembly was then connected to a syringe pump delivery system. Deionized water was used as the working fluid, with volumetric flow rate up to 1.5 mL/min. The heat sink was subjected to a uniform heat flux of 5 W on the underside. Performance of the heat sink was evaluated in terms of pressure drop and the convection thermal resistance. Pressure drop across the heat sinks was less than 10 kPa, dominated by wall surface area rather than the small surface area contributed by cylindrical pins. At low flow rate, caloric thermal resistance dominated the overall thermal resistance of the heat sink. When compared to a microchannel without pins, the pin-fin microchannel reduced convective thermal resistance of the heat sink by approximately a factor of 4.


Energies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idris Al Siyabi ◽  
Sourav Khanna ◽  
Senthilarasu Sundaram ◽  
Tapas Mallick

Concentrating photovoltaic has a major challenge due to the high temperature raised during the process which reduces the efficiency of the solar cell. A multi-layered microchannel heat sink technique is considered more efficient in terms of heat removal and pumping power among many other cooling techniques. Thus, in the current work, multi-layered microchannel heat sink is used for concentrating photovoltaic cooling. The thermal behavior of the system is experimentally and numerically investigated. The results show that in extreme heating load of 30 W/cm2 with heat transfer fluid flow rate of 30 mL/min, increasing the number of layers from one to four reduces the heat source temperature from 88.55 to 73.57 °C. In addition, the single layered MLM heat sink suffers from the highest non-uniformity in the heat source temperature compared to the heat sinks with the higher number of layers. Additionally, the results show that increasing the number of layers from one to four reduces the pressure drop from 162.79 to 32.75 Pa.


Author(s):  
Ildar F. Akhmadullin ◽  
Randall D. Manteufel ◽  
Christopher Greene

Experimental measurements are reported for high-flow liquid-cooled heat sinks designed for cooling electronics components such as a CPU. The flow rate is up to 2 GPM with internal flow passage length scales on the order of 0.1 to 1.0 mm in the primary heat transfer region. Of the designs tested, three achieved maximum flow rates with pressure drops of less than 1.5 psi. Two have lower maximum flow rates because of higher internal flow resistance. In the experiments, particular attention is given to sources of experimental uncertainty and the propagation of uncertainty through the calculations to reported thermal resistance, R (°C/W). Analysis includes bias and precision errors for direct measurement of temperature, flow rate, and pressure drop. Additionally, a separate thermocouple calibration test is reported to establish measurement uncertainties for the system. Main emphasis is made to the error propagation in thermal resistance calculations of each heat sink and measurement of heat removal rate from the CPU. Data is used to determine the standard error for R which ranges up to about 0.05 °C/W with the maximum for one heat sink up to 0.07 °C/W. Averaging of repeated measurements at the same flow rate without accounting for the range of the original data will result in lower uncertainties in the reported results.


Author(s):  
M. B. Effat ◽  
M. S. AbdelKarim ◽  
O. Hassan ◽  
M. Abdelgawad

With the advance of miniaturization technology, more and more electronic components are placed onto small electronic chips. This leads to the generation of high amounts of thermal energy that should be removed for the safe operation of these electronic components. Microchannel heat sinks, where electronic chips are liquid cooled instead of the conventional air cooling techniques, were proposed as a means to improve cooling rates. Later on, double layer micro channel heat sinks were suggested as an upgrade to single layer microchannel heat sinks with a better thermal performance. In the present study the effects of increasing the number of layers of the microchannel heat sink to three-layers as well as the effect of changing the flow arrangements (counter and parallel flows) within the three channel layers on the thermal performance of the heat sink were investigated. In all investigated cases the temperature distribution over the base of the microchannel heat sink system and the total pressure drop are reported. A range of mass flow rates from 1×10−4 to 5×10−4 kg/s was considered. Uniform heat flux conditions were considered during the study. COMSOL Multiphysics finite element package was employed for the numerical analysis. Results indicate significant enhancement in the uniformity of the temperature on the processor surface when multi-layer channels were employed, compared to the single-layer case. The uniformity in the temperature distribution was accompanied by reduction of pressure drop across channels for the same mass flow rate and heat flux conditions. The counter flow arrangement showed the best temperature distribution with the uniform heat flux cases.


Author(s):  
Ning Lei ◽  
Alfonso Ortega ◽  
Ranji Vaidyanathan

Liquid-cooled small channel heat sinks are a promising heat dissipation method for high power electronic devices. Traditional mini and microchannel heat sinks consist of a single layer of high aspect ratio rectangular channels. An alternative approach investigated in this paper is to stack multiple layers of low aspect ratio (circular or square cross-section) channels together to create multiple layer minichannel heat sinks. These multilayer heat sinks can achieve high heat flux due to the high heat transfer coefficients from small channels coupled with the large surface areas from the multilayer structure. In this research, multilayer copper and silicon carbide (SiC) minichannel heat sinks were experimentally and computationally characterized in single-phase flow over various flow rates. The experimental data indicated that in many cases, multilayer heat sinks have significant advantages over single-layer equivalents with reductions in thermal resistance and pressure drop. In order to investigate the optimal design of such structures, a detailed 3-D resistance network model was developed and used to predict the heat sink surface temperature and fluid pressure drop. The model uses an uncoupled approach and was validated by compared with conjugate CFD simulations and the experimental data. An extensive parametric study was performed on copper and SiC heat sinks with respect to channel geometry, number of layers, and thermal conductivity. The simulations indicated that for a fixed overall heat sink flow rate, an optimum number of channel layers exists for copper and SiC because of the competing trends of increasing surface area and decreasing per channel flow rate as the number of layers increases. In addition, the heat sink “effectiveness” decreases with increasing number of layers as the thermal resistance from the top surface, where heat is applied, to the lower layers of the heat sink becomes excessive. In the simulation the optimized number of layers is highly dependent on material, channel width, channel aspect ratio, and wall thickness. If the pumping power is an important issue for the optimization, the heat sink with medium channel width is a wise choice, which achieves small thermal resistance with reasonable pressure drop.


Author(s):  
Ralph L. Webb

Conventional technology to cool desktop computers and servers is that of the “direct heat removal” heat sink, which consists of a heat sink/fan mounted on the CPU. Although this is a very cost effective solution, it is nearing its end of life. This is because future higher power CPUs will require a lower R-value than can be provided by this technology, within current size and fan limits. This paper discusses new technology that uses “indirect heat removal” technology, which involves use of a single or two-phase working fluid to transfer heat from the hot source to an ambient heat sink. This technology will support greater heat rejection than is possible with the “direct heat removal” method. Further, it will allow use of higher performance air-cooled ambient heat sinks than are possible with the “direct heat removal” heat sink. A concern of the indirect heat removal technology is the possibility that it may be orientation sensitive. This paper identifies preferred options and discusses the degree to which they are (or or not) orientation sensitive. It should be possible to attain an R-value of 0.12K/W at the balance point on the fan curve.


Author(s):  
Devdatta P. Kulkarni ◽  
Priyanka Tunuguntla ◽  
Guixiang Tan ◽  
Casey Carte

Abstract In recent years, rapid growth is seen in computer and server processors in terms of thermal design power (TDP) envelope. This is mainly due to increase in processor core count, increase in package thermal resistance, challenges in multi-chip integration and maintaining generational performance CAGR. At the same time, several other platform level components such as PCIe cards, graphics cards, SSDs and high power DIMMs are being added in the same chassis which increases the server level power density. To mitigate cooling challenges of high TDP processors, mainly two cooling technologies are deployed: Liquid cooling and advanced air cooling. To deploy liquid cooling technology for servers in data centers, huge initial capital investment is needed. Hence advanced air-cooling thermal solutions are being sought that can be used to cool higher TDP processors as well as high power non-CPU components using same server level airflow boundary conditions. Current air-cooling solutions like heat pipe heat sinks, vapor chamber heat sinks are limited by the heat transfer area, heat carrying capacity and would need significantly more area to cool higher TDP than they could handle. Passive two-phase thermosiphon (gravity dependent) heat sinks may provide intermediate level cooling between traditional air-cooled heat pipe heat sinks and liquid cooling with higher reliability, lower weight and lower cost of maintenance. This paper illustrates the experimental results of a 2U thermosiphon heat sink used in Intel reference 2U, 2 node system and compare thermal performance using traditional heat sinks solutions. The objective of this study was to showcase the increased cooling capability of the CPU by at least 20% over traditional heat sinks while maintaining cooling capability of high-power non-CPU components such as Intel’s DIMMs. This paper will also describe the methodology that will be used for DIMMs serviceability without removing CPU thermal solution, which is critical requirement from data center use perspective.


Author(s):  
Zhigang Gao ◽  
Tianhu Wang ◽  
Yuxin Yang ◽  
Xiaolong Shang ◽  
Junhua Bai ◽  
...  

Abstract The issue of regenerative cooling is one of the most important key technologies of flight vehicles, which is applied into both the engine and high-power electrical equipment. One pattern of regenerative cooling channels is the microchannel heat sinks, which are thought as a prospective means of improving heat removal capacities on electrical equipment of smaller sizes. In this paper, three numerical models with different geometric configurations, namely straight, zigzag, and sinusoid respectively, are built to probe into the thermal hydraulic performance while heat transfer mechanism of supercritical methane in microchannel heat sinks for the heat removal of high-power electromechanical actuator is also explored. In addition, some crucial influence factors on heat transfer such as inlet Reynolds number, operating pressure and heating power are investigated. The calculation results imply the positive effect of wavy configurations on heat transfer and confirm the important effect of buoyancy force of supercritical methane in channels. The heat sinks with wavy channel show obvious advantages on comprehensive thermal performance including overall thermal performance parameter ? and thermal resistance R compared with that of the straight one. The highest Nu and average heat transfer coefficient am appear in the heat sink with zigzag channels, but the pumping power of the heat sink with sinusoidal channels is lower due to the smaller flow loss.


Author(s):  
Dylan Farnam ◽  
Bahgat Sammakia ◽  
Kanad Ghose

Increasing power dissipation in microprocessors and other devices is leading to the consideration of more capable thermal solutions than the traditional air-cooled fin heat sinks. Microchannel heat sinks (MHSs) are promising candidates for long-term thermal solution given their simplicity, performance, and the development of MHS-compatible 3D device architecture. As the traditional methods of cooling generally have uniform heat removal on the contact area with the device, thermal consequences of design have traditionally been considered only after the layout of components on a device is finalized in accordance with connection and other criteria. Unlike traditional cooling solutions, however, microchannel heat sinks provide highly nonuniform heat removal on the contact area with the device. This feature is of utmost importance and can actually be used quite advantageously, if considered during the design phase of a device. In this study, simple thermal design criteria governing the general placement of components on devices to be cooled by microchannel heat sink are developed and presented. These thermal criteria are not meant to supersede connection and other important design criteria but are intended as a necessary and valuable supplement. Full-scale numerical simulations of a device with a realistic power map cooled by microchannel heat sink prove the effectiveness of the criteria, showing large reduction in maximum operating temperature and harmful temperature gradients. The simulations further show that the device and microchannel heat sink can dissipate a comparatively high amount of power, with little thermal danger, when design considers the criteria developed herein.


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