Experimental Investigation of the Thermal Performance of a Manifold Hierarchical Microchannel Cold Plate

This article is focused on experimental investigation of the single-phase thermal-fluid performance of a manifold microchannel cold plate with integral hierarchical branching channels. The use of a multiphysics topology optimization technique for the development of the studied microchannel structure is briefly reviewed. An experimental test setup is then described followed by measured temperature and pressure results. Specifically, unit thermal resistance and pressure drop values for the hierarchical microchannel jet impingement cold plate are compared with corresponding results for the jet impingement of a flat plate. These experiments confirm that the hierarchical microchannel system provides increased heat transfer with a negligible change in pressure drop when compared with the standard flat plate system.