Convective heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of various array configurations to simulate the cooling of electronic modules

Abstract

This paper reports an experimental investigation to explore the effects of the size of modules, the presence of a cylindrical module and the missing module on the heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop characteristics of array configurations composed of individual rectangular modules for three different Reynolds numbers namely; 1690, 2250 and 2625. Generally, it was found that using different sizes or shapes of modules in an array configuration tends to increase the Nusselt number by as much as 40% for the rectangular module and 28% for the cylindrical module. The presence of a missing module in the array resulted in a 37% enhancement in the Nusselt number downstream the missing module. Pressure drop results indicate that large size modules tend to enhance the pressure drop at their row locations by as much as 15%, while the cylindrical module tends to attenuate the pressure drop especially at low Reynolds number.