Experimental investigation of liquid metal alloy based mini-channel heat exchanger for high power electronic devices

Abstract

There is currently a growing demand for developing efficient techniques for cooling integrated electronic devices with ever increasing heat generation power. To better tackle the high-density heat dissipation difficulty within the limited space, this paper is dedicated to clarify the heat transfer behaviors of the liquid metal flowing in mini-channel exchangers with different geometric configurations. A series of comparative experiments using liquid metal alloy Ga68%In20%Sn12% as coolant were conducted under prescribed mass flow rates in three kinds of heat exchangers with varied geometric sizes. Meanwhile, numerical simulations for the heat exchangers under the same working conditions were also performed which well interpreted the experimental measurements. The simulated heat sources were all cooled down by these three heat dissipation apparatuses and the exchanger with the smallest channel width was found to have the largest mean heat transfer coefficient at all conditions due to its much larger heat transfer area. Further, the present work has also developed a correlation equation for characterizing the Nusselt number depending on Peclet number, which is applicable to the low Peclet number case with constant heat flux in the hydrodynamically developed and thermally developing region in the rectangular channel. This study is expected to provide valuable reference for designing future liquid metal based mini-channel heat exchanger.