Experimental study of embedded manifold staggered pin-fin microchannel heat sink

Abstract

High-heat-flux thermal management of high-power chips in electronic devices is becoming more and more critical. Manifold microchannel heat sink is one of the effective choices. In order to improve the heat dissipation capacity of manifold microchannel heat sink, a silicon-based thermal test chip including staggered pin-fin microchannels is designed and fabricated. Staggered pin-fin microchannels and rectangular microchannels with the same area size are embedded on the opposite side of the silicon-based thermal test chip for liquid-cooled heat dissipation. The experiments are conducted using HFE7100 as the working fluid. The heat transfer performance and the flow characteristic of two distinct microchannel structures are evaluated. It is found that the differences in temperature, convection heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop caused by different microchannel structures are greatly related to the mass flow rate. The heat transfer performance of the staggered pin-fin microchannel heat sink is better than that of the rectangular microchannel heat sink at a larger mass flow rate, but it also brings greater flow pressure drop. The bubble effect caused by the transition from single-phase to two-phase flow in microchannels makes the monotonicity of the convection heat transfer coefficient decrease significantly and the monotonicity of the pressure drop increase significantly. Compared to rectangular microchannel heat sinks, staggered pin-fin microchannel heat sinks reach the two-phase flow at higher heat flux. At the mass flow rate of 5 mL/s and the heat flux of 700 W/cm2, the staggered pin-fin microchannel heat sink can reduce the chip surface temperature by 8 K compared with the chip surface temperature of the rectangular microchannel heat sink.