Experimental Investigation of Flow Boiling Performance of Open Microchannels With Uniform and Tapered Manifolds (OMM)

Boiling can provide orders of magnitude higher cooling performance than a traditional air cooled system especially related to electronics cooling application. It can dissipate large quantities of heat while maintaining a low surface temperature difference. Flow boiling with microchannels has shown a lot of potential due to its high surface area to volume ratio and latent heat removal. Flow instabilities and early critical heat flux have however prevented its successful implementation. A novel flow boiling design is experimentally investigated to overcome the above mentioned disadvantages while presenting a very low pressure drop. The design uses open microchannels with a tapered manifold (OMM) to provide stable and efficient operation. Distilled, degassed water at atmospheric pressure is used as the fluid medium. Effect of tapered block with varied dimension is investigated. Heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop data for uniform and tapered manifolds for plain and microchannel chips are presented. A maximum heat flux of 281.2 W/cm² at 10.1 °C wall superheat is obtained with microchannel chips using a tapered manifold. The CHF was not reached as the performance exceeded the heater capacity. The maximum pressure drop obtained for the above mentioned configuration was only 3.3 kPa.