Computational Study of Grooved Microchannel Enhancements

As electronics devices continue to increase in thermal dissipation, novel methods will be necessary for effective thermal management. Many macro-scale enhancement techniques have been developed to improve internal flow heat transfer, with a dimple feature being particularly promising due to its enhanced mixing with potentially little pressure penalty. However, because dimples may be difficult to fashion in microchannels, two-dimensional grooves are considered here as a similar alternate solution. Computational fluid dynamics methods are used to analyze the flow and thermal performance for a groove-enhanced microchannel, and the effectiveness is determined for a range of feature depths, diameters, and flow Reynolds numbers. By producing local impingement and flow redevelopment downstream of the groove, thermal enhancements on the order of 70% were achieved with pressure increases of only 30%. Further optimization of this concept should allow the selection of an appropriate application geometry, which can be studied experimentally to validate the concept.