Numerical study of the geometrically graded micro-channel heat sink for high heat flux application

Abstract

With the rapid development of the micro-scale and nano-scale electronic systems, the requirement of the operating temperature becomes more stringent to ensure good reliability and safety. Hence, thermal management technologies for dissipating the heat generated become an important agenda for researchers over the world. Micro-channel heat sink has been widely investigated by researchers and it is known that by increasing the total heat transfer area to volume ratio could enhance overall heat transfer performance. There are various types of micro-channel available such as straight channel, pin fin and wavy channel. Straight channel is the most common used of micro-channel in the market due to ease of manufacturing and low cost. There are several drawbacks associated with the straight channel design especially cooling performance is deteriorated along the flow direction. This will lead to the development of high temperature gradient from upstream to downstream and resulted uneven cooling performance which in turn shortens the device life expectancy. In this study, a novel geometrically graded micro-channel heat sink is introduced to improve the thermal performance of the conventional straight channel heat sink. Computational fluid dynamic simulations were conducted to investigate the performance of the novel fin micro-channel and straight channel heat sink. Under heat load of 2000 W, the geometrically graded micro-channel heat sink could reduce the average temperature to 69.6 °C and variation of temperature to 2.7 °C.