Mechanical Characterisation and Analysis of a Passive Micro Heat Exchanger

Abstract

Heat exchangers are widely used in many mechanical, electronic, and bioengineering applications at macro and microscale. Among these, the use of heat exchangers consisting of a single fluid passing through a set of geometries at different temperatures and two flows in T-shape channels have been extensively studied. However, the application of heat exchangers for thermal mixing over a geometry leading to vortex shedding has not been investigated. This numerical work aims to analyse and characterise a heat exchanger for microscale application, which consists of two laminar fluids at different temperature that impinge orthogonally onto a rectangular structure and generate vortex shedding mechanics that enhance thermal mixing. This work is novel in various aspects. This is the first work of its kind on heat transfer between two fluids (same fluid, different temperature) enhanced by vortex shedding mechanics. Additionally, this research fully characterise the underlying vortex mechanics by accounting all geometry and flow regime parameters (longitudinal aspect ratio, blockage ratio and Reynolds number), opposite to the existing works in the literature, which usually vary and analyse blockage ratio or longitudinal aspect ratio only. A relevant advantage of this heat exchanger is that represents a low-Reynolds passive device, not requiring additional energy nor moving elements to enhance thermal mixing. This allows its use especially at microscale, for instance in biomedical/biomechanical and microelectronic applications.