International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 111 (2017) 1071–1078

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International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhmt

A new scheme for reducing pressure drop and thermal resistance

simultaneously in microchannel heat sinks with wavy porous fins
Gui Lu a,b, Jun Zhao c, Lin Lin c, Xiao-Dong Wang a,b,⇑, Wei-Mon Yan d,⇑⇑
a
Research Center of Engineering Thermophysics, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China
b
Key Laboratory of Condition Monitoring and Control for Power Plant Equipment of Ministry of Education, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China
c
School of Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China
d
Department of Energy and Refrigerating Air-Conditioning Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 10608, Taiwan

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A new design of wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins is proposed to reduce simultaneously
Received 3 March 2017 pressure drop and thermal resistance. A three-dimensional solid-fluid conjugate model with considering
Received in revised form 17 April 2017 heat transfer and flow in porous media is adopted to validate the effectiveness of the new design. The
Accepted 18 April 2017
results show that the wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins reduce simultaneously pressure drop
Available online 24 April 2017
and thermal resistance compared with conventional wavy microchannel heat sinks with solid fins. The
marked pressure drop reduction in the wavy microchannel with porous fins comes from the combination
Keywords:
of permeation effect and the slip effect of the coolant fluids. The improvement of heat transfer perfor-
Wavy microchannel heat sink
Porous fin
mance is attributed to the combinative effect of the enhanced coolant mixing by Dean vortices, the pro-
Slip velocity longed flow route by increasing equivalent channel length, and the forced permeation by jet-like
Pressure drop impingement. The new concept is also examined for various microchannel heat sink designs with differ-
Thermal resistance ent wavy amplitude, wavelength, channel width and channel height, which indicates the wide range of
applicability of the new microchannel concept.
Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction To enhance the heat transfer performance, a great number of

Microchannel heat sink has been shown to be a very effective
way to remove high heat load in microelectronic devices, espe-
cially for those with heat dissipation levels exceeding the capacity
of conventional air cooling systems [1–4]. A large heat transfer
coefficient can be achieved by reducing channel hydraulic diame-
ter. However, the decrease of hydraulic diameter will inevitably
increase pressure drop, which need more pumping power to force
the coolant through a greater number of small channels. In general,
low thermal resistance is the desired effect while pressure drop
penalty is how we pay for that effect. Due to the intrinsic conflict
between heat transfer enhancement and pressure drop penalty,
effective and innovative improvement is still needed for
microchannel heat sinks to meet the ever-increasing cooling
demands of microelectronic devices.
⇑ Corresponding author at: Research Center of Engineering Thermophysics, North
China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China.
⇑⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: wangxd99@gmail.com (X.-D. Wang), wmyan@ntut.edu.tw
(W.-M. Yan).
efforts have been devoted to reducing thermal resistance of
microchannel heat sink, such as surface modification [5,6]; increas-
ing the heat transfer capacity of solid materials or coolant, e.g. high
thermal conductivity solid materials [7] or nanofluids [8,9]; or
novel designs, e.g., inserting solid ribs, porous blocks or baffles into
the channel [10–15], or using wavy channels [16–20]. Among these
designs, the outcome of lower thermal resistance usually accompa-
nies with the penalty of high pressure drop, which is still an obsta-
cle to the practical applications. The pressure drop can be reduced
by using two-phase microchannel heat sinks [21–24], ultrahy-
drophobic surfaces [25], multi-layer designs [26–28] or porous
fin design [29]. However, as expected, the thermal resistance is
not reduced with these methods. The optimization method is a
promising technique in microchannel heat sink designs, which
has been widely used to ensure low thermal resistance and pres-
sure drop of microchannel heat sinks [30–33]. Technically, an opti-
mized design is only the tradeoff between the heat transfer and the
pressure drop penalty, in which the lowest thermal resistance is
always obtained with the restriction of an acceptable pressure
drop. Reducing the thermal resistance simultaneously with low
pressure drop penalty is still in its challenging research.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatmasstransfer.2017.04.086
0017-9310/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1072 G. Lu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 111 (2017) 1071–1078

In our previous studies, we proposed a novel concept of
microchannel heat sink using porous fins rather than conventional
solid fins [29]. The new design remarkably reduces pressure drop
by 43.0–47.9%, while thermal resistance only increases by 4.1–
4.9%. With such a superiority of pressure drop controlling, the por-
ous fin microchannel heat sink can be further improved in the heat
transfer performance, even though the reducing of thermal resis-
tance might cost some pressure drop penalty. Therefore, we pro-
pose a new design of wavy microchannel heat sink with porous
fins to reduce simultaneously pressure drop and thermal resistance
in this work. A three-dimensional solid-fluid conjugate model with
considering heat transfer and flow in porous media is adopted to
validate the feasibility of the new design. The mechanisms on
reduction of the pressure drop and thermal resistance are
explained with flow and thermal details. In addition, a parametric
analysis is performed to examine the application scope of the new
concept microchannel heat sinks.
2. Methods
2.1. Wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins
Fig. 1 show the schematic of the wavy microchannel heat sink
with porous fins. The heat sink consists 50 channels and 50 ribs
with rectangular cross-section and has a dimension of Lx
Ly -

Lz = 14
10
0.35 mm3. Each channel has a height of Hc and a
width of Wc. The thickness of bottom silicon plate is d. Due to
the symmetry, only a symmetric unit is selected as the computa-
tional domain, which is composed of one microchannel and two
half-fins, as shown in Fig. 1(b). The wavy microchannel in this
work is generated by two parallel wavy vertical fins. Fig. 1(c)
shows a wavy channel with constant wavelength k and constant
amplitude A. The profile of each wavy unit can be represented by
two circular arcs. The thickness of vertical fin is Wf, which is made
of porous silicon with a porosity of e, as shown in Fig. 1(d). The
wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins can be fabricated
using standard micro-fabrication techniques as traditional wavy
microchannel heat sinks, which is photo-lithography and deep
reactive ion etching.
2.2. Numericalmodels
A three-dimensional solid-fluid conjugate heat transfer model is
used to study the heat transfer and flow in the heat sink.
Forchheimer-Brinkman-Darcy equation is used to describe the
flow in porous fins. The flows are incompressible, laminar and
steady-state flows. The thermal properties of solid and fluid are
independent of temperatures. The gravitational force is neglected
due to the small size. The heat sink is thermal insulation from
ambient. The porous fins are homogeneous, isotropic and saturated
with coolant, and in local thermal equilibrium with the coolant.
The mass, momentum, and energy equations of the coolant are
as follows:
!
rV ¼0 ð1Þ
! ! !
qf ðV rÞ V ¼ rp þ lf r2 V ð2Þ
!
qf cp V rT ¼ kf r2 T ð3Þ
!
where V , q, p, l, and cp are the velocity vector, density, pressure,
dynamic viscosity, and specific heat of the coolant, respectively. T
is the temperature.

Lz

Hc
δ
z
x Wf/2 Wc Wf/2
y
(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 1. The schematics of (a) wavy microchannel heat sink; (b) its periodic unit (simulation domain); (c) wavy length and wavy magnitude; (d) microchannel heat sink with
porous fins.
 G. Lu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 111 (2017) 1071–1078 1073

Energy equation for the solid bottom: u ¼ uin ; v ¼ w ¼ 0; T ¼ 300 K at x ¼ 0 for channel
u ¼ v ¼ w ¼ 0; T ¼ 300 K at x ¼ 0 for porous fin ð8Þ
ks r T s ¼ 0
2
ð4Þ
p ¼ pout at x ¼ Lx
The flows in the porous fins are modeled by the addition of a
momentum source term to the standard fluid flow equations, Eq. The velocities, momentum fluxes, and temperatures are all
(2) [34]: assumed to be continuous at the interfaces between porous fins
! and channel.
el qe2 C F ! ! At the bottom,
Sp ¼ þ pffiffiffiffiffi j V j V ð5Þ
kp kp !
V ¼0 ð9aÞ
where e is the porosity; kp is the permeability of the coolant in the
porous fin; CF is the quadratic drag factor. The source term is com- Ts ¼ T ð9bÞ
posed of two parts: a viscous loss term and an inertial loss term.
The energy equations for the porous fins are,
ks rT s ¼ kf rT ð9cÞ
!
qcp ðe V rTÞ ¼ keff r T 2
ð6Þ In the above equations, u, v, and w are the velocity components
in the x-, y-, and z- directions, uin is the inlet velocity, pout is the
where the effective thermal conductivity, keff, in the porous fin outlet pressures. A constant heat flux, qw = 100 w cm2, is applied
expressed by [35]: to the bottom wall of the heat sink for all simulations.
1 The overall thermal resistance is defined as:
keff ¼ 2ks þ ð7Þ
e=ð2ks þ kf Þ þ ð1  eÞ=3ks T max  T min T max  T in
R¼ ¼ ð10Þ
where ks is the thermal conductivity of the solid matrix in the por- qw A qw L x L y
ous fin.
where Tmax and Tmin are the maximum and minimum temperatures
The boundary conditions are listed as follows:
in the heat sink.
For the inlet and outlet:
The governing equations are solved with finite volume method
0.6 30
and SIMPLE (Semi Implicit Method for Pressure-Linked Equation)
f experimental data [17] algorithm [36]. Grid-independent have been tested to find the
f numerical predictions tradeoff between the efficiency and the accuracy. Iteration crite-
0.5
Nu experimental data [17] 25 rion for convergence is set at 106. Since the new design of wavy
Nu numerical predictions microchannel heat sink with porous fins has not yet been fabri-
0.4
cated and is lack of experimental data, we validate the present
(a) 20
0.3 numerical model by comparing separately with the experiments
Nu
f

of Sui et al.’s [17] wavy microchannel heat sinks and Hetsroni

0.2 15 et al.’s [37] porous microchannel heat sinks, using the identical
geometry and operating conditions as in the experiments, as
0.1 shown in Fig. 2. The simulation results agree well with the exper-
10
imental data, which indicates the reliability of the numerical meth-
0.0 ods in this work.
200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900

Re
3. Results and discussion
0.50
0.45 Experimental data in Ref. [37] Water is used as coolant fluid in this work. The bottom plate
0.40
Numerical prediction and the solid matrix in the porous fins are silicon. The thermal
0.35
properties of water and silicon are listed in Table 1. All the geom-
0.30
D p (MPa)

Table 2
0.25 Heat sink geometry parameters.
0.20
Parameters Minimum Constant Maximum
0.15
Heat sink length Lx (mm) – 1.4 –
0.10 Heat sink width Ly (mm) – 1.0 –
0.05 Heat sink height Lz (mm) – 0.35 –
Bottom thickness d (mm) – 0.1 –
0.00
0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.2 Fin width Wf (mm) – 0.12 –
-1 Channel width Wc (mm) 0.08 – 0.13
u (m s )
Channel height Hc (mm) 0.25 – 0.5
Wavelength k (mm) 0.7 – 2
Fig. 2. Model validation by comparing with (a) Sui et al.’s experiments [17], and (b)
Wavy amplitude A (mm) 0.02 – 0.06
Hetsroni et al.’s experiments [37].

Table 1
Thermophysical properties of the coolant, substrate and fin materials.

Material q (kg m3) cp (J kg1 K1) k (W m1 K1) l (kg m1 s1)
Coolant: water 997 4179 0.613 0.000855
Substrate: silicon 2329 702 124 –
Fins: porous silicon 2329 702 124
1074 G. Lu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 111 (2017) 1071–1078

etry parameters are list in Table 2. The porosity of porous fin is
e = 0.6. The inlet velocity ranges from 1.0 to 1.8 m s1.
3.1. Effectiveness and relevant mechanisms
Fig. 3shows the thermal resistance and the pressure drop across
the heat sink for the wavy microchannel heat sinks with porous
fins and conventional solid fins at various coolant inlet velocities.
The simulation parameters for porous fins are e = 0.6, kp = 1 -

1010 m2, CF = 0.3, while the channel high is 250 lm and channel
width is 80 lm. The wavy channel with a constant wavelength
k = 1000 lm and amplitude A = 30 lm, which consists of 14 wavy
units along x-direction. The width ratio of fin-to-pitch, b = Wr/
(Wc + Wr), is 0.6. For both the new and the conventional designs,
the thermal resistance decreases with increasing inlet velocities,
while the pressure drop increasesas inlet velocities increasing.
Compared with the conventional wavy heat sinks with solid fins,
both the thermal resistance and the pressure drop of heat sink with
wavy and porous fin designs reduce for all the simulated inlet
velocities. Unlike the preview reports [29], the decrease of pressure
drop in the new design heat sinks is not at the price of increasing
thermal resistance. Take uin = 1.4 m s1 for example, the pressure
drop reduces by 39.22% for the wavy microchannel heat sink with
porous fins as compared with wavy heat sinks using solid fins.
With such large superiority in pressure drop, the thermal resis-
tance of the new design does not increase but decreases by
14.48%. For all simulated velocities, the reduction of pressure drop
ranges from 31.4% (uin = 1.8 m s1) to 47.3% (uin = 1.0 m s1), while
60 2
ε =0.6, kp=1e-10 m , CF=0.6
55 conventional wavy
porous-fin wavy
the reduction of thermal resistance ranges from 10.6% (uin = 1.0 -
m s1) to 17.1% (uin = 1.8 m s1). The results show the effectiveness
of the new design with wavy channel and porous fin, which can
reduce simultaneously pressure drop and thermal resistance.
To reveal the mechanism on reduction in the pressure drop,
velocity details in the wavy heat sinks with porous fins at various
x locations for uin = 1.0 m s1 were shown in Fig. 4. Unlike the solid
fin heat sinks, the coolant fluids in the channel can permeate into
the porous fins in the new concept of heat sink, which might be
the fact related to the reduction of pressure drop. By integrating
the velocity over the outlets of one channel cross-sectional area
for both the new and the conventional wavy heat sink, we obtain
the flow rate of 20.0 mm3 s1 for conventional wavy heat sink
and 17.02 mm3 s1 for the new wavy heat sink, which means
14.9% of flow rate reduces due to the coolant permeation into the
porous fins. According to the definition of pressure drop for the
single-phase fully developed laminar flow, Dp = 1/2
kqLV2/D, in
which k is the frictional resistance coefficient, q is the density, L is
the flow length, V is the velocity and D is the hydraulic diameter,
the permeation of fluids into the porous fins only contributes
26.3% pressure drop reduction for the wavy heat sink with porous
fins, which is only half of the total pressure drop reduction (47.3%
for uin = 1.0 m s1). The permeation of coolant fluid causes a non-
zero velocity distribution in the porous fins, which is shown in
Fig. 5. The velocities gradually increase from 0.237 m s1 to
2.8
fin fin
2.4
0.350
2.0
0.325
1.6
u (m s )

50 0.300
-1

45 0.275
RT (K W )

1.2
-1
∆ p (kPa)

40
39.22% 0.250
35 14.48% 0.8
30 0.225
0.4
25 0.200
porous fin wavy
20 0.175 0.0 conventinal wavy
15
0.150 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.12 0.16 0.20
1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 δ
-1
y (mm)
uin (m s )
Fig. 5. Velocity distributions for wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins
Fig. 3. Thermal resistance and pressure drop for the convectional heat sink and (referred as new in the figure), and conventional microchannel heat sink with solid
porous fin wavy heat sink at various coolant inlet velocities. fins (referred as conventional).

(a) (b) (m s-1)

Fig. 4. Coolant velocity distributions in the (a) wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins, and (b) conventional microchannel heat sink with solid fins along flow
direction.
 G. Lu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 111 (2017) 1071–1078 1075

0.431 m s1 for 0 < x < 0.040 mm in the left half porous fin, then V

sharply increase to 1.084 m s1 at x = 0.06 mm, which is the inter- 0.19
0.14
0.09
face between the channel and fin. However, for the solid fin 0.04
-0.01
microchannel heat sink, the velocity at the interface between the -0.06
-0.11
channel and fin is zero due to the no-slip boundary condition. The -0.16
-0.21
non-zero velocity at the interface indicates that the coolant actually
‘‘slips” rather than sticking to the fin wall over which it flows. The
effect of ‘‘slip” flows at the fin-channel interface due to the coolant
permeation into porous fin is similar to those studies of drag reduc-
tion using ultrahydrophobic surfaces. For ultrahydrophobic sur-
faces, the significant drag reduction can be obtained, which was
interpreted by the slip effects on the wall [38,39]. According to
the relation of pressure drop and the slip length [25], the pressure
drop reduction due to the slip effect can be estimated by
Dpno-slip Dpslip
¼ hþ3d
3d
, in which d = 4.5 lm is slip length which can be (a)
Dpno-slip
easily obtained from Fig. 5. and h = 40 lm is half-width of channel.
The result indicates that 25.5% pressure droplet reduction can be
attributed to the slip effects, which contributes the other half of
the total pressure drop reduction. It should be noted that the sum
of pressure drop reductions due to permeation effect (26.3%) and
slip effect (25.5%) is 51.8%, which is close to the model prediction
of 47.3%. Therefore, the significant pressure drop reduction in the
wavy microchannel with porous fins comes from the combination
of permeation effect and the slip effect of the coolant fluids.
Compared with straight microchannel heat sinks, the wavy heat
(b)
sinks can reduce the thermal resistance significantly, which has
been interpreted by the formation of Dean vortices in the channel
cross section due to the secondary flows, the vortices enhance the 2.8
coolant mixing by the generated chaotic advection [16,40]. The fin fin
2.4
wavy design also prolongs the flow route of cool coolant in the
microchannel, which makes the coolant have enough time to cool 2.0
the substrate on the one hand, but increase the pressure drop on
u (m s )

1.6
-1

the other hand. These two effects, Dean vortices and the prolonging
flow route, still valid for the present new design with porous fins, 1.2
which was shown in Fig. 6(a) and (b). Besides these two effects,
0.8
the wavy channel changes the direction of main flows, inducing
porous
the jet-like impingement flow to disturb the thermal and the flow 0.4 original
boundary layer [16–20,40], and hence, enhances the heat transfer
performance. For the wavy microchannel heat sinks with porous 0.0
fins, the jet-like impingement flow is further enhanced by forcing 0.00 0.04 0.08 0.12 0.16 0.20
the cold coolant to permeate into the porous fins. The direction of y (mm)
main flows in the channel diverges from the center line of the chan-
nel due to the wavy vertical fins, resulting in a wavy flow which
(c)
changes the direction alternately leftwards or rightwards. Fig. 6
(b) and (c) schematically and quantitatively show such leftward or Fig. 6. Mechanisms of thermal resistance reduction in wavy microchannel heat sink
rightward jet-like fimpingement flows. For the leftward deviation, with porous fins: (a) formation of Dean vortices; (b) prolonging flow route and
the mean velocity in the left half of porous fin is larger than that in forced permeation by leftward or rightward jet-like impingement flows (qualitative
schematic); (c) forced permeation by leftward or rightward jet-like impingement
the right half fin, indicating more coolant fluids are fed into the left
flows (quantitative).
half porous fin by the jet-like impingement flow. Such leftward or
rightward jet-like impingement flow will force the cold coolant to
permeate into the porous fins, which will significantly cool the ver- wavy amplitude, wavelength, channel width, and channel height.
tical fins, as shown in Fig. 7. The temperatures in the porous fins of Fig. 8 shows the effects of wavy amplitude (Fig. 8(a)) and wave-
wavy heat sinks are much lower than those in the conventional wavy length (Fig. 8(b)) on pressure drop and thermal resistance of wavy
heat sinks with solid fins. With a large temperature gradient microchannel heat sink with porous fins. When considering the
between the bottom plate and the fin, the heat dissipation through effects of wavy amplitude, the other heat sink parameters are fixed,
the fins is enhanced. Therefore, the heat transfer performances of e.g. wavelength k = 2000 lm, channel width Wc = 80 lm and chan-
the wavy heat sinks with porous fins are enhanced by the combina- nel height Hc = 250 lm. The porous fin parameters are e = 0.6,
tion of three effects, the enhanced coolant mixing by Dean vortices, kp = 1
1010 m2, CF = 0.3. The inlet velocity is 1.6 m s1. The ratios
the prolonged flow route by increasing equivalent channel length, of pressure drop and thermal resistance of porous fin design to the
and the forced permeation by the jet-like impingement. conventional solid fin design, dp = Dpporous/Dpsolid and dRT = DRT,-
porous/DRT,solid, are used to compared the performances of new

3.2. Feasibility for various heat sink designs designs with conventional design. As shown in Fig. 8. , both dp
and dR are less than 1, indicating that both pressure drop and ther-
To further examine the effectiveness of the new design, we mal resistance of wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins are
design various types of wavy microchannel heat sinks, by changing less than those of conventional wavy heat sinks with solid fins. The
1076 G. Lu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 111 (2017) 1071–1078

(a)

(b)

x=2 mm x=7 mm x=12 mm

Fig. 7. Temperature contours for (a) wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins, and (b) conventional microchannel heat sink with solid fins at various cross sections with
different x-locations.

pressure drop ratio decreases with increasing wavy amplitude,
while the thermal resistance ratio increases with increasing wavy
amplitude. The results indicate that the degree of heat transfer
enhancement is reduced by increasing wavy amplitude. However,
even for the largest wavy amplitude in present work, the thermal
resistance of the porous fin design is still reduced by 16.5% com-
pared with the solid fin design, while the pressure drop is only
39.0% of the solid fin design. The wavy heat sink with porous fins
can both reduce pressure drop and thermal resistance for various
wavy amplitudes. For various wavelength and channel width

0.88
0.85 2
ε =0.6, k p=1e-10 m , C F=0.6
0.62
2
ε =0.6, k p=1e-10 m , C F=0.6 0.90 0.87
0.80 δp
0.89 δ RT 0.86
0.60 δp
δ RT 0.75 0.85
0.88
0.58 0.70 0.84

δ RT
0.87 (a)
δp

(a)
δ RT

0.56 0.65 0.83

δp

0.86
0.60 0.82
0.54
0.85 0.81
0.55
0.52 0.84 0.80
0.50
0.50 0.83 80 90 100 110 120 130
20 30 40 50 60
W c (μm )
A (μ m)
0.54
2
ε =0.6, k p=1e-10 m , C F=0.6
0.95 2
0.535 ε =0.6, k p=1e-10 m , C F=0.6
1.05
0.52 δp δp
δ RT 0.94 0.530
δ RT
0.50 1.00
0.525
0.93
δ RT

(b)
δ RT
δp

δp

0.48
0.520 (b) 0.95

0.92
0.46 0.515 0.90

0.44 0.91 0.510 H c = 432 μ m

0.85
800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 250 300 350 400 450 500

λ (μ m ) H c (μm )

Fig. 8. The feasible examines for the wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins Fig. 9. The feasible examines for the wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins
with various parameter designs: (a) various wavy amplitudes and (b) various with various parameter designs: (a) various channel widths and (b) various channel
wavelengths. heights.
 G. Lu et al. / International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 111 (2017) 1071–1078
Fig. 10. The temperature distributions on the cross section of (a) the conventional
wavy heat sink; (b) new wavy heat sink with porous fins (Hc = 500 lm).
designs, both pressure drop and thermal resistance of new design
are also less than the conventional design, as shown in Figs. 8
(b) and 9(a). For the microchannels with various channel height,
the same tendency (dp < 1 and dRT < 1) can be observed for the
height ranges of 250 lm  Hc  432 lm. As shown in Fig. 9(b),
dRT is larger than 1 when Hc > 432 lm, indicating that the thermal
resistance of the wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins is
larger than that of the conventional wavy heat sink. The reason
can be explained as follows. The heat absorbed from the bottom
plate of heat sink can be removed in two ways: one is that the heat
is conducted through the bottom plate and convected by coolant;
the other is that the heat is conducted through the vertical fins
and then convected by the coolant. When a very large channel
height is adopted, the temperatures in the upper region of vertical
fins will be greatly lower for the wavy heat sink with porous fins
than the conventional wavy heat sink fins due to the lower thermal
conductivity of porous fins, as shown in Fig. 10. Therefore, convec-
tion heat transfer in the upper region of channels is inevitably
deteriorated, since the temperature difference between vertical
fins and coolant decreases. Thus, once such heat transfer deteriora-
tion overwhelms the heat transfer enhancement caused by the
forced permeation by the jet-like impingement, dRT will be larger
than one. It should be noted that the pressure drop reduction is still
remarkable for the wavy heat sink with porous fins when
Hc > 432 lm, which is only half (51%) of the solid fin design.
4. Conclusions
In this work, a wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins is
proposed to reduce simultaneously pressure drop and thermal
resistance. A three-dimensional solid-fluid conjugate model with
considering heat transfer and flow in porous media is adopted to
validate the effectiveness of the new design. The mechanisms on
reduction of the pressure drop and thermal resistance are
explained with flow and thermal details. In addition, the feasibility
of new design was validated by many microchannel heat sink
designs with different geometry parameters.
The new design with wavy channel and porous fin reduce
simultaneously pressure drop and thermal resistance. The marked
1077
pressure drop reduction in the wavy microchannel with porous
fins comes from the combination of permeation effect and the slip
effect of the coolant fluids. The heat transfer performances of the
wavy heat sinks with porous fins are enhanced by the combination
of three effects, the enhanced coolant mixing by Dean vortices, the
prolonged flow route by increasing equivalent channel length, and
the forced permeation by the jet-like impingement.
The concept of wavy microchannel heat sink with porous fins
can be applied for various microchannel heat sink designs with dif-
ferent wavy amplitude, wavelength, channel width and channel
height, which indicates the wide range of applicability of the
new microchannel concept. The thermal resistance is not reduced
for the porous heat sinks with very large channel heights; however,
the pressure drop reduction is still marked.
Acknowledgement
This study was partially supported by the National Science Fund
for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (No. 51525602), the
National Science Fund of China (No. 51606064), the Postdoctoral
Science Foundation of China (Nos. 2016T90071 and
2015M581046) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Cen-
tral Universities (No. 2016MS21).
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