Modeling of confined bubble growth and heat transfer characteristics in parallel microchannel heat sinks

Abstract

The current study aims to present the modeling and numerical analysis of parallel microchannel heat sinks accounting for transient phenomena during confined bubble growth in one of the microchannels, considering dynamic aspects for the bubble growth and heat transfer characteristics to identify flow instabilities. The model incorporates the estimative of the inlet velocities and pressure drop due to parallel channels’ interaction. Therefore, the model can predict conditions that result in reversal flow, as well as the main trends and values of the main parameters during this process. A parametric analysis is performed numerically aiming to infer the effects of the number of channels, heat flux, inlet mass velocity, and location of the nucleation site on the occurrence of reversal flow.