Liquid metal manifold microchannel heat sink for ultra-high heat flux cooling

Abstract

Advanced heat dissipation technology is crucial for chip operation and performance utilization. Room temperature liquid metal convection cooling technology has demonstrated its efficacy as a viable approach for addressing high heat flux heat dissipation. However, the smaller specific heat capacity of liquid metal leads to a large temperature rise, hindering the advancement of its cooling technology. To address this, a liquid metal manifold channel structure is proposed to convert the continuous long-range flow into a segmented short-range flow. The good matching between liquid metal and manifold structures is adequately demonstrated through a comparison with alternative coolant and channel structure. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of liquid metal manifold channel cooling in dealing with a heat flux of 1000 W/cm2, ensuring that the maximum temperature of the chip remains below 351.7 K. Moreover, the convective heat transfer coefficient even reaches 106 W/(m2·K), which is ten times larger than that of water conventional microchannel heat sink. Orthogonal experiments analyzed the impact of structural parameters on dissipation performance, including the height of the microchannel, ratio of manifold length to fin length, length of fin in manifold, width of channel, and ratio of fin with to channel width. The height of the microchannel has been identified as the most critical factor. This manifold structure mitigates the inherent limitation of liquid metal's lower specific heat capacity, enabling efficient thermal management for electronic devices under ultra-high heat flux conditions.