Digitized Heat Transfer for Thermal Management of Compact Microsystems

Abstract

Active thermal management of compact microsystems by a periodic array of discrete liquid metal droplets is proposed and referred to as “digitized heat transfer.” This is in contrast to convective heat transfer by a continuous liquid flow. Two methods of droplet actuation, electrowetting on dielectric and continuous electrowetting, are described. Liquid metals or alloys support significantly higher heat transfer rates than other fluids, such as water or air. In addition, electrowetting is an efficient method of microscale fluid control, requiring low actuation voltages and very little power consumption. These concepts are used in this investigation to design an active management technique for high-power-density electronic and integrated micro systems. Preliminary calculations indicate that this technique could potentially offer a viable cooling strategy for achieving some of the most important objectives of electronic cooling, i.e., minimization of the maximum substrate temperature, reduction of the substrate temperature gradient and removing substrate hot spots. Numerical simulation of a droplet in a microchannel is also investigated. We propose a technique for dynamically calculating the slip velocity at the wall boundary including both the advancing and receding contact lines. The technique is based on the observed non-Newtonian behavior of a continuous liquid flow at high shear rates and its associated slip velocity (Thompson and Trioan 1997). While most of the wall boundary has negligible slip, significant slip at the advancing and receding contact lines are calculated from the data itself.