Numerical modelling and analysis of porous surface-enhanced jet cooling using copper inverse opals in single-phase flow

Abstract

Abstract In this study, we propose a novel cooling scheme that utilizes copper inverse opals (CIOs) for surface enhancement in a single-phase impingement jet cooling system. We perform computational fluid dynamics simulations to evaluate the cooling performance of the CIO jet coolers. Our modelling results indicate that the proposed CIO-coated cooler can significantly reduce the average temperature and improve the temperature uniformity across the entire chip surface. The average Nusselt number of the CIO-coated cooler can reach up to 2.8 times that of the flat surface jet cooler. However, the porous structure of the CIO-coated cooler increases the total pressure drop. To determine designs with high cooling performance and low energy consumption, we investigate two crucial design factors, namely the inlet velocity and the nozzle-to-CIO distance. Our analysis reveals that increasing the inlet velocity further enhances the heat transfer, but at the expense of high pressure drop. On the other hand, a larger nozzle-to-CIO distance results in a lower pressure drop but also reduces the heat transfer coefficient. The effects of nozzle-to-CIO distance are further understood by studying the flow resistance network. Furthermore, we present a reduced-order model that accurately captures the thermofluidic characteristics of the proposed design.