Convective Boiling in Silicon Microchannels With Localized Heating and Thermometry

While silicon microchannel heat sinks are promising for high heat flux integrated circuits, they have not reached their potential because microscale convective boiling is poorly understood. Previous work integrated sensors and heaters into a silicon chip to provide distributed thermometry, but did not specifically examine hotspots or thoroughly treat experimental uncertainty. This work microfabricates a single channel in a thinned silicon beam, instrumented with doped sensors and aluminum heaters, to study the wall temperature and fluidic response to flow boiling induced by non-uniform heating. Uncertainty analysis shows a need for better measurements of the fabricated channel including channel cross section and surface roughness. Refined data from this work will suggest improvements to existing boiling flow models, which may then be implemented into a design tool for optimizing boiling flow microchannel heat sinks.