Study of thawing behavior of liquid metal used as computer chip coolant

Abstract

Liquid metal has recently been identified as an excellent coolant for the thermal management of computer chip. However, in an extremely low temperature environment, the liquid metals may subject to solidification due to local freezing, which may possibly cause failure of their flowing role in transferring heat away. To resolve this potential difficulty, we proposed here to quickly melt the frozen coolant by implanting in advance a wire heater into the liquid metal. A theoretical model was set up to characterize such phase change heat transfer problem through introduction of moving heat source principle. And a closed form analytical solution was obtained using Green's function under several typical boundary conditions. Meanwhile, proof-of-concept experiments were also performed in a refrigerator closet to validate the theoretical prediction. Both theoretical results and experimental measurements reveal that, the frozen metal can be successfully thawed within several dozens of seconds. This would guarantee a quick start and highly safe running of liquid metal for computer chip cooling.