Thermal-hydraulic performance analysis of a hybrid micro pin–fin, jet impingement heat sink with non-uniform heat flow

Abstract

• We present a novel concept for hotspot-targeted, energy efficient HT-JIHS for electronic chips. • The optimized jet hole arrangement and target plate can efficiently alter the flow distribution. • The total pressure drop will be dramatically reduced by enlarging the inlet diameter. • Optimized design is suitable for highly non-uniform heat flux maps. • The pumping power consumption for optimized design is less than 0.1%. Jet impingement as a highly efficient cooling method has been broadly used in the field of heat dissipation for high heat flow electronics. Well-designed structures including jet hole and pin–fin arrangement can significantly alter flow fields to provide a favorable trade between increased heat transfer performance and total pressure loss. In order to solve the imbalance problem of temperature uniformity and power consumption caused by non-uniform heat flux distribution in multi-core integrated circuits, a novel jet impingement cooling concept, for hotspot-targeted, energy efficient cooling of non-uniform heat generation electronics, was proposed in this paper. A three-dimensional numerical simulation was carried out to investigate the effects of jet hole diameter and distribution, heat transfer plate type and inlet area on heat transfer and resistance performance. The heat transfer coefficient, total pressure drop, maximum temperature rise and temperature non-uniformity were selected as the performance parameters. Compared with the traditional jet impingement heat sink, the well-designed heat sink in this work achieves an improvement of 58% in temperature non-uniformity while the total pressure drop is reduced by 68.7% at the same mass flow rate. In addition, the pumping power consumption is only 0.093% and 0.061% of the total heating power for 150 W/cm 2 and 300 W/cm 2 hotspot heat flux respectively while ensuring the acceptable temperature non-uniformity.