Novel PCM and Jet Impingement Based Cooling Scheme for High Density Transient Heat Loads

Breakthroughs in the recent cutting-edge technologies have become increasingly dependent on the ability to safely dissipate large amount of heat from small areas. Improvements in cooling techniques are therefore required to avoid unacceptable temperature rise and at the same time maintain high efficiency. Jet impingement is one such cooling scheme which has been widely used to dissipate transient and steady concentrated heat loads. With constantly increasing transient cooling needs, conventional pin-fin cooling and conventional jet impingement cooling are not meeting the requirements. Considerable improvements are therefore required to meet such stringent requirements without any significant changes in the cooling system. A combined cooling scheme based on jet impingement and phase change materials (PCMs) is presented as one such alternative to existing cooling systems. A high heat storage capability of PCMs in combination with a high heat transfer rates from impingement cooling can help overcome the existing heat distribution and transient cooling problems in high heat flux dissipating devices. Preliminary conjugate CFD simulations show promising results. Additionally, experimental validation of the simulation predictions has also been performed. A reasonably good agreement was found between the predictions and experiments.