Experimental investigation of flow distribution and heat transfer performance of fully and partially heated microchannels

Abstract

The microchannel cooling technique appears to be a viable solution to high heat rejection requirements of today s high-power electronic devices. As the trend is globally marching towards the compact size, the size of the component gets smaller but the heat involved in the component increases. The thermal design of the small electronic cooling devices is a key issue that needs to newlinebe optimized in order to keep the system temperatures at certain levels. To dissipate the heat involved in the components the world is emerging towards the better innovative cooling technology and microchannel cooling is one of the potential cooling techniques like immersion cooling, heat pipe cooling, spray cooling and jet impingement cooling. Thus the need of microchannel has become vital. The microchannel cooling finds its vast applications in all the fields. In this thesis, detailed experimental investigations are carried out in flow distribution and in heat transfer in the microchannel heat sink. The heat transfer studies have been performed with deionized water and nanofluid Al2O3/water of volume concentration 0.1% and 0.25% in a microchannel heat sink in a fully heated condition and in partially heated condition. A detailed experimental investigation is carried out to study the flow maldistribution in a microchannel heat sink by using deionized water as the coolant in an aluminum microchannel heat sink with 25 numbers of rectangular microchannels of hydraulic diameter 763 and#956;m, for Reynolds number range of 200 650. The prime focus of this experimental study is to find the suitable combination of header shape and flow inlet configuration to minimize the flow maldistribution effect.