Study on flow non-uniformity and design of tapered manifold inlet structure of manifold microchannels

Effective cooling of electronic equipment in the integrated control system is critical. Manifold microchannel (MMC) liquid cooling technology has many advantages, but the non-uniform distribution of coolant limits its heat transfer performance. This study analyzed the non-uniformity of MMC heat sinks through numerical simulations. A tapered manifold inlet structure was proposed to improve flow uniformity. Additionally, since numerical simulations are computationally intensive, a temperature prediction method for MMC heat sink based on a reduced-order model was proposed. The results show that the tapered manifold inlet structure can improve the flow uniformity, and the improvement is more obvious with the increase of the taper angle. The average relative error (RE) and the average maximum absolute error (MAE) of the reduced-order model are 0.00406 % and 0.78 K respectively, which indicates that the reduced-order model can predict the temperature distribution of MMC heat sink quickly and accurately.