Development of an instrumented glass microchannel device for critical heat flux visualization and studies [IC cooling applications]

Abstract

Boiling in microchannels is an important candidate for cooling of electronic chips. A crucially important factor in the design of microchannel boiling heat transfer is the critical heat flux (CHF). This work presents the development of a glass microchannel device for quantitative investigations of CHF and visualization of boiling phenomena at microscale. The device is instrumented with heaters and temperature sensors to map the temperature distribution in the axial direction. The use of low thermal conductivity glass reduces the heat conduction losses, and improves the accuracy of CHF values extracted from experimental results. This work presents the fabrication and packaging of a single microchannel device.