Flow Boiling Heat Transfer in a Silicon Microchannel Heat Sink Using Liquid Crystal Thermography

The present study focuses on the experimental investigation of boiling heat transfer characteristics and pressure drop in a silicon microchannel heat sink. The microchannel heat sink consists of a rectangular silicon chip in which 45 rectangular microchannels were chemically etched with a depth of 295 μm, width of 254 μm, and a length of 16 mm. Un-encapsulated Thermochromic liquid Crystals (TLC) are used in the present work to enable nonintrusive and high spatial resolution temperature measurements. This measuring technique is used to provide accurate full and local surface-temperature and heat transfer coefficient measurements. Experiments are carried out for mass velocities ranging between 290 to 457 kg/m².s and heat fluxes from 6.04 to 13.06 W/cm² using FC-72 as the working fluid. Experimental results show that the pressure drop increases as the exit quality and the flow rate increase. High values of heat transfer coefficient can be obtained at low exit quality (x_e < 0.2). However, the heat transfer coefficient decreases sharply and remains almost constant as the quality increases for an exit quality higher than 0.2.