Experimental Study of Flow and Heat Transfer Characteristics in Silicon-Based Corrugated Microchannels

In this paper, the silicon-based corrugated microchannels used for the heat transfer enhancement were fabricated by MEMS technology for the first time. Both the flow and convective heat transfer characteristics of the deionized water through these corrugated microchannels were investigated experimentally, and comparisons were performed between corrugated microchannels and straight microchannels with the same cross-sectional aspect ratio (height-to-width ratio) and same hydraulic diameter. Experimental results showed that both the flow friction and Nusselt number in corrugated microchannels increased considerably compared with those in straight microchannels, and this increase became enlarged with the increase in the Reynolds number. With the same pumping power, using corrugated microchannels instead of straight microchannels caused the reduction in the total thermal resistance. The heat transfer enhancement mechanism of the corrugated microchannels was discussed. The results presented in this paper help to design the high efficiency integrated chip cooling system.