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 it’s 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.