Heat Transfer Characteristics of Water Cooled Minichannel Heat Sink Using Different Fluid Flow Geometries

Abstract

Efficient heat transfer for compact electronic components has become a major need in these days. For this purpose, we require a minichannel heat sink with a liquid cooling system that makes these requirements as possible. In this work, both analytical and CFD investigations have been carried out to calculate the heat transfer performance of a minichannel heat sink consisting of cross sections with three different shapes of a rectangular, trapezoidal and hexagonal in which working fluid is made to flow. The simulation is conducted with water as the working fluid for three different shapes with Reynolds number ranging from 200 to 1000 and analyzed numerically for the single-phase laminar flow with the boundary condition of constant heat flux. The channel dimensions and inlet velocity effects on the Nusselt number, pressure drop, and heat transfer coefficient are studied. The 3D steady-state, laminar flow, and governing equations of heat transfer are solved using the finite volume method by commercial ICEM-Fluent software.