Flow and Heat Transfer in Branched Wavy Microchannels

The Wavy channels are supposed to enhance performance of microchannel heat sink through chaotic advection. The change in boundary layer thickness (thinning) and the macroscopic mixing due to the formation of Dean’s vortices have been found to be main reasons for enhanced heat transfer in wavy microchannel. Present study carries out a detailed numerical investigation for flow and heat transfer in wavy channel. A 3D geometry for a single loop of wavy channel is modeled in GAMBIT and simulated in CFD software FLUENT. The basic dimensions were 0.15 mm width, 0.3 mm height and 1.5 mm length. The formation of Dean vortices are shown. In parametric study, the effect of Re number on the flow and heat transfer performance is shown. Heat transfer was found to be increased with Re. The effect of Aspect ratio is shown. The channel with the aspect ratio of 0.5 is found to be best among the channels studied including wavy and straight microchannels. A novel concept of secondary branches is introduced to wavy microchannel to take advantage of high pressure zone at crust. The branched wavy microchannel encouraged the secondary flow thus enhanced the macroscopic mixing. Due to disrupt of boundary layer development and its re-initialization, an improved thermal performance was achieved.