Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Nanofluid-Enhanced Heat Transfer in Microchannel Cooling Systems for High-Power Electronics

Abstract

The high rate of miniaturization and the power density of current electronic equipment has increased the demand to find highly effective thermal management solutions. The microchannel heat sinks (MCHSs) are materials that have been given a lot of attention as they have high surface-area-volume ratio and have high ability to conduct heat away. Nevertheless, the efficiency of the cooling of conventional fluids is also low due to their low thermal conductivity. The engineered suspensions of nanoparticles are Nanofluids with better thermophysical properties that have the potential to improve heat transfer greatly. The paper is an in-depth exploration of an experimental and numerical investigation of the flow and heat transfer of Al 2 O 3- water nanofluid in a microchannel cooling system that is intended to be used in a high-wattage electronics. Nanofluids of volume concentrations of 0.1% to 0.5% were made, and tested at different Reynolds number in a custom made MCHS. Measures were made of key performance parameters such as thermal resistance, pressure drop and convective heat transfer coefficient. In ANSYS Fluent, parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations were run and the temperature fields and flow behavior were predicted using the two-phase mixture model. These findings indicated that nanofluid concentration of 0.3 was the best concentration, which can be used to enhance heat transfer performance by 18.4 percent and with insignificant hydraulic cost. Experimental data was well agreeable with numerical predictions with a deviation up to a maximum of less than 6 percent. The paper shows that nanofluid-enhanced microchannel cooling as a stable and scalable cooler to high-power gainful electronic systems of the next generation.