A Study on Heat Transfer in Micro-Channel Heat Sinks

Heat transfer in micro-channels generated a lot of interest in the heat transfer

community in the 1980s, due to its possible applicability in the emerging field of
heat transfer in electronic systems. High performance electronic systems
generate heat flux comparable to that generated in the surface of the sun!
Micro-Channel heat sinks have the ability to absorb this huge amount of heat
from a comparatively small surface area.

A study of micro-channel heat sink is basically finding out the optimised channel
shape and size that will extract maximum amount of heat within the allowable
pressure drop limit as permissible by the system to maintain the flow. Heat
transfer in micro channels is a conjugate problem, that is, both heat conduction
in solid components and heat convection in fluid needs to be analysed
simultaneously. This produces a great difficulty in solving the governing
differential equations analytically. Numerous experiments have been carried out
with different channel sizes and geometries, different working fluids both in
single phase and multiphase heat transfer conditions. Each experiment has
provided a co-relation specific to that experimental condition.

In this project I will compare the experimental results obtained using different
flow conditions and try to come up with the best design (in terms of coolant,
sizes and shape of channel) for different working conditions. In the end I will also
compare the Micro-channel heat sink with other techniques that has been
developed for electronic cooling (spray cooling, jet impingement cooling and
immersion flow boiling) and give a remark on their comparative advantages and
disadvantages. I will refer to the following literature for the aforesaid project.

[1] Dong Liu, Suresh V. Garimella, (2005) "Analysis and optimization of the
thermal performance of microchannel heat sinks", International Journal of
Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 15 Iss: 1, pp.7 - 26

[2] I. Mudawar et al., High flux boiling in low flow rate, low pressure drop mini-
channel and micro-channel heat sinks, Int. J Heat Mass transfer, vol 37, no. 2, pp
321-332, 1994.

[3] Jungho Kim, Spray cooling heat transfer: The state of the art, International
Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow 28 (2007) 753-767.

[4] I. Mudawar et al., Two-phase flow in high-heat-flux micro-channel heat flux for
refrigeration cooling applications: Part I- Pressure drop characteristics,
International Journal of Heat and Mass transfer 48 (2005) 928-940.

[5] I. Mudawar et al., Experimental and numerical study of pressure drop and
heat transfer in a single phase micro-channel heat sink, International Journal of
heat and mass transfer 45 (2002) 2549-2565.

[6] W.Qu, I.Mudawar, Analysis of three-dimensional heat transfer in micro-

channel heat sinks, International Journal of heat and mass transfer, 45 (2002)
3973-3985.
[7] I Mudawar et al. Flow boiling heat transfer in two-phase micro-channel heat
sinks-I. Experimental investigation and assessment of correlation methods.
International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 46 (2003) 2755-2771.