Numerical Investigation of Heat Transfer Enhancement of Al2O3 Nanofluid in Microchannel Heat Sink

Abstract

This study focusses on using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to study the enhancement of heat transfer from the use of AL2O3 nanofluid in a microchannel heat sink (MCHS) to develop a more efficient cooling device for high-power integrated circuits. The objective is to investigate the heat transfer performance, parameters, and enhancement rate using Ansys Fluent software, and to compare the results with experiments to show the effectiveness of this method. This study will also focus on the relationship between the friction fraction and nanoparticles volume fraction to improve the heat transfer enhancement in the MCHS. The temperature, pressure, heat transfer coefficient, Nusselt number, and friction coefficient are analysed in this study. The results showed that an increase in the volume fraction of the nanofluid leads to an increase in the average heat transfer coefficient. The results showed that for 4% nanofluid volume concentration, the Nusselt Number has improved by 10% compared to pure water. However, an increase in volume concentration also resulted in an increase in pressure drop.