Enhancing the thermal performance of different flow configuration minichannel heat sink using Al2O3 and CuO-water nanofluids for electronic cooling: An experimental assessment

Abstract

Several previous studies on liquid cooling of high-power density electronic servers have been conducted for different configurations of the liquid channels, operating conditions and coolant, pure liquid or using nanofluid. Most of these studies have been done numerically or analytically without comprehensive experimental validation and comparison. To fill this research gap, a comprehensive experimental study was conducted in the present work to evaluate and compare the thermal performance of electronic devices using liquid cooling system by passing water, Al2O3 or CuO nanofluid in different flow mini-channels configurations (Serpentine, parallel and wavy channels). The results of the present experimental investigations showed that (i) heat sinks with serpentine mini-channels has a better thermal performance than heat sinks with wavy and parallel mini-channels heat sinks, (ii) the wavy channel heat sinks has a better thermal performance than parallel channel heat sinks, (iii) the presence of the nanoparticles provides a decrease in the thermal resistance and an augmentation in the average Nusselt number compared with pure water for all the liquid channels configurations with better performance of CuO-water nanofluid compared with Al2O3-water nanofluid, and (iv) for serpentine channels at 120 W power density, the minimum and maximum increase in the Nusselt number is (4.49%–12.5%) for 0.1% vol. Al2O3-water nanofluid and (5.77%–16.01%) at 0.1% vol. CuO-water nanofluid. For the purpose of validations and assessments, the results of the present experimental work were compared with the results of the previous analytical/numerical work as well as with the cases of the previous experimental works.