Numerical Investigation of Mass Flow Distribution in Wavy Microchannel Heat Sink

Abstract

In order to cope with ever increasing demands from the electronic, automotive and aerospace industries, cooling devices have to be small in size, light-weight and of high performance.The search for a more efficient cooling technology becomes one of the bottle neck problems of the further development of the electronic and automotive industry. Microchannel liquid cooling is one of the candidates for this purpose. The most important parameter in the microchannel is the distribution of the coolant inside the channel. A uniform flow in the microchannel leads to uniform heat transfer.A numerical simulation is carried out to minimize the flow maldistribution inside the microchannel. The microchannel was made as wavy shaped channel. There are six channels with hydraulic diameter of 1mm each. Header is the major part in the microchannel which supplies fluid into different channels. In this work, five different shapes of the header were considered namely circular, frustum conical, rectangular, triangular and trapezoidal. From the simulation results it was found that the mal-distribution is significantly affected by flow rate and shape of the header.