Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, Vol.39, No.6, 1436-1449, June, 2022
Temperature nonuniformity management in heat sinks through applying counter-flow design complex minichannels
Thanks to the electronic industrial revolution, miniaturization, which is a trend to manufacture smaller products and devices, has been extended to hardware components. In these devices, the heat flux magnitude increases due to the smaller surface area. Therefore, heat dissipation and temperature uniformity are crucial issues that must be managed precisely, otherwise destructive effects on system performance and device lifespan are unavoidable. Heat sinks are efficient equipment utilized to solve these dire consequences. In this study, to improve the temperature uniformity of electronic components, novel minichannels, including straight walls with wavy fins (SWS) and wavy walls with straight fins (WSW), were examined with counter-flow patterns. The observations imply that these novel minichannels bring 18.1-40.3% decrease of the base temperature under the heat flux of 100 kW m-2. It is also revealed that using the novel minichannels can increase the temperature uniformity up to 93.1%. In addition, overall hydrothermal performance can be enhanced as high as 1.64 under the pumping power of 0.0374W. It was also found that the use of WSW models leads to lower magnitudes of pumping power compared to SWS models. It is concluded that applying the proposed minichannels could be an efficient approach to manage temperature non-uniformity in heat sinks.