Numerical Investigation of Heat Transfer Enhancement in a Microchannel With Grooved Surfaces

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical investigation for two types of grooves (rectangular and arc shapes) fabricated in the microchannel surfaces, which leads to enhancement in single-phase cooling. The pressure drop and heat transfer characteristics of the single-phase microchannel heat sink were investigated numerically for laminar flow. For this purpose, the conjugate heat transfer problem involving simultaneous determination of temperature fields in both solid and liquid regions was solved numerically. The numerical model was validated with comparison to experimental data, in which good agreement was seen. A simple microchannel with available experimental data was selected, and it was shown that using grooved surfaces on this microchannel has a noticeable effect and heat removal rate can be increased using this technique. The results depict that the arc grooves have a higher heat removal flux compared with rectangular grooves but the latter have a higher coefficient of performance for the case in which grooves are made in the floor and both side walls. Also, it was shown that a grooved microchannel with higher wall thickness and lower mass flow rate of cooling water has a higher heat removal flux and coefficient of performance compared with a simple microchannel with minimum wall thickness. Effect of various sizes and distances of the floor grooves was determined, and the cases for maximum heat removal rate and coefficient of performance for both rectangular and arc grooves were obtained.