Experimental Investigation on the Minichannel Cold Plate for High Temperature Uniformity Based on a Compact Thermal Model

Abstract

A compact thermal model for multiple heat sources mounted on minichannel cold plate to achieve high temperature uniformity was presented in the authors’ previous work. In this paper, based on this compact thermal model, a fractal tree-like minichannel cold plate was designed and fabricated to obtain high temperature uniformity, and its thermal performance was tested under different working conditions by experiments. The comparison reveals that the measured temperatures are close to the ones predicted by the compact thermal model. The cold plate designed based on the compact thermal model can help multiple heat sources achieve high temperature uniformity, and the maximum temperature difference among the heat sources is 1.3 °C. Moreover, a straight minichannel cold plate was designed and tested under the same conditions. The measured results show that there exists relatively large temperature gap among the heat sources, and the maximum value is 6.7°C, which is much higher than 1.3 °C in the fractal tree-like minichannel. Therefore, the fractal tree-like microchannel or minichannel cold plate has an advantage over the straight one in obtaining temperature uniformity for multiple heat sources.