Fixed Valve Piezoelectric Micropump for Miniature Thermal Management Module

In this paper, we discuss implementation of a micropump with fixed-geometry Tesla-type valves in a closed-loop forced convection thermal management system. The micropump was integrated with a heat sink in a stacked array and fabricated using a photochemical etching process. Two different micropump cavity diameters of 10-mm and 15-mm were fabricated and tested. For each cavity diameter, there were three valve sizes ranging from 140-μm to 340-μm in width. For the best-performing micropump we also evaluated the impact of varying the aspect ratio by adding and removing layers within the micropump. Our results indicated that as the diameter or cavity depth increased the performance of the pump in terms of block load pressure and flow rate degraded. Also, decreasing the valve width for each cavity diameter and height tended to increase the block load pressure and the resulting flow rate. For a pump with 140-μm valve width and an optimal cavity height of 550-μm (11-layers), the maximum flow and pressures obtained for a single pump subassembly were nearly 1.1-mL/min and 0.8-psi. A stack of 4 micropump subassemblies provided more than 5.5 mL/min flow rate and 0.5-psi pressure. The micropump power consumption was less than 50-mW per subassembly, and including the driving electronics power conversion, it consumed less than 0.5-W of power under these conditions. The thermal performance of an integrated liquid cooling module on standard Pentium P4 microprocessor running at up to 40-W was comparable to an off-the-shelf heatsink, but in a package less than 1/10 the size. This unit is currently being considered for blade server applications.