Performance evaluation of simple radial fin design for single phase liquid flow in microchannel heat sink

Abstract

This paper numerically investigates heat transfer performance and characteristics in single-phase liquid cooling in microchannels with radial arrangement of fins having inherent symmetry to mitigate the problem of flow maldistribution. The effects of number of fins, channel depth and flow rate on Nusselt number and substrate temperature are obtained. The relative thermal performance and overall efficiency are compared with respect to two different base cases having minimum number of channels and minimum channel depth. For increasing values of flow rate and channel depth, contradicting effects in terms of temperature uniformity are obtained. By varying only number of channels, has no significance until it is coupled with channel depth, which suggests that aspect ratio of inlet cross-sectional area should be considered as a significant factor which is capable of generating secondary flows in single phase liquid flows. The overall efficiency of case with 70 number of channels, 200 µm depth and 15 ml/min is found to be highest.