Heat Transfer Enhancement in Microchannels Incorporating Slanted Grooves

The ever-increasing density, speed, and power consumption of microelectronics has led to a rapid increase in the heat fluxes which need to be dissipated in order to ensure their stable and reliable operation. The shrinking dimensions of electronics devices, in parallel, have imposed severe space constraints on the volume available for the cooling solution, defining the need for innovative and highly effective compact cooling techniques. Microchannel heat sinks have the potential to satisfy these requirements. However, significant temperature variations across the chip persist for conventional single-pass parallel flow microchannel heat sinks since the heat transfer performance deteriorates in the flow direction in microchannels as the boundary layers thicken and the coolant heats up. To accommodate higher heat fluxes, enhanced microchannel designs are needed. The present work presents an idea to enhance the single-phase convective heat transfer in microchannels. The proposed technique is passive, and does not require additional energy to be expended to enhance the heat transfer. The idea incorporates the generation of a spanwise or secondary flow to enhance mixing and hence decrease fluid temperature gradients across the microchannel. Slanted grooves can be created on the microchannel wall to induce the flow to twist and rotate thus introducing an additional component to the otherwise laminar flow in the microchannel. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of such an enhanced microchannel heat sink. The heat transfer was found to increase by up to 12% without incurring substantial additional pressure drops.