Scalable capillary-pin-fin structure enabled efficient flow boiling

Abstract

Flow boiling with dielectric coolant is not only a highly desirable approach for effective electronic cooling but is also notorious for its poor scalability. Most current flow boiling enhancement strategies are based on silicon substrates with footprint areas less than 1 cm2, which greatly limits their applications to large-size electronics. This study developed a scalable channel configuration to facilitate efficient flow boiling on large copper substrates (∼10 cm2), in which the channel walls are formed by porous pin-fin arrays. This type of hybrid capillary wall makes up for the limitation of conventional machining in creating intricate features, making it scalable and feasible for developing large-size, two-phase cold plates. Moreover, effective two-phase separation and sustainable film evaporation have been realized in the current work. As a result, the proposed structure achieved a 512% increase in heat dissipation when the heating area scales up 480% from the silicon microchannels with micro-pin-fin arrays. Experiments showed a base heat flux of 106.1 W/cm2 was dissipated over a heating area of 9.6 cm2 using the dielectric fluid HFE-7100 at a mass flux of 247 kg/m2 s. It outperformed most existing metallic flow boiling heat sinks using the same coolant at a similarly high coefficient of performance as small-size enhanced silicon microchannels.