Numerical Investigation on the Thermal Management Performance of a Liquid-Cooled Cold Plate with Different Working Fluids

Abstract

The heat transfer and flow characteristics of the liquid-cooled cold plate with different working fluids are numerically investigated in the present study. The working fluids, composed of water and nano particles, can improve the thermo-physical properties of the base fluid, which would affect the thermal performance and pressure drop of the liquid-cooled cold plate. The thermal performance of the Al2O3–H2O nanofluid was evaluated at different volume fraction of the nanoparticle as well as at different volume flow rate of the nanofluid. The CuO-H2O, ZnO-H2O and Al2O3-H2O nanofluids at the same volume fraction are also numerical studied. The numerical results show that the nanofluid could minimize the heater’s temperature compared to the base fluid, and the CuO-H2O nanofluid shows the best thermal management performance. However, it is also noticed that the thermal management performance improved by nano particles is limited because of the poor improvement in the thermo-physical properties of the nanofluids. Another conclusion could be made that the pressure drop for the liquid-cooled cold plate is considerably large, which is mainly depended on the density of the nanofluids. The local pressure loss for the plate induced by the right angle elbow is half of the total pressure loss, which indicates that the microchannel should be optimized in the practical application to reduce the pressure drop.