A coupled model of heat spreading and flow boiling in microchannels

Abstract

The increasing waste heat density of chips requires advanced cooling technologies to prevent the chip from overheating. Two phase cooling in microchannels with a pin fin structure is a promising method which can extract high heat fluxes with a relatively low pressure drop. Current models to predict the performance of these devices typically assume a uniform heat flux along the flow direction. However, the local heat flux strongly depends on the local properties of the fluid and the local temperature in the adjacent heat spreader. This paper presents a novel model which couples a 2D analytical temperature field to a flow boiling model to obtain an accurate prediction of the boiling process and the maximum temperature at the chip interface. The effectiveness of the coupled model is demonstrated by an optimization study, which shows the sensitivity of design parameters on the maximum temperature.