Ph.D. Proposal Presentation by Xiaojin Wei
Thursday, February 28, 2002

(Dr. Yogendra Joshi, advisor)

"Stacked Microchannel Heat Sinks for Liquid-Cooling of Microelectronics Devices"

Abstract

Microchannel liquid cooling has emerged as one promising thermal management technique for microelectronics devices because of the inherent large heat transfer coefficients and the compactness. Application of microchannel heat sink for microelectronics, however, is very limited due to the large pressure drop, flow mal-distribution and temperature non-uniformity. The objective of this study is to identify and micro-fabricate alternative microchannel heat sinks that have smaller pressure drop/pumping power, more uniform flow distribution and smaller temperature non-uniformity in the chip to be cooled, compared with existing microchannel heat sinks. A stacked microchannel heat sink is proposed in which several layers of microchannels are bonded into a stack. Numerical simulation has shown that, compared with conventional microchannel, stacked microchannels with dedicated manifolds provide smaller pressure drop, better flow distribution and temperature uniformity. The stacked microchannel heat sink is being fabricated employing micro-machining techniques on silicon and will be tested in a closed-loop experimental setup to evaluate the flow resistance and thermal performance. Micro PIV technique will be used to measure flow distribution in the manifolds and flow field in microchannels with micro-resolution, which will help understand fundamental flow and heat transfer in microchannels.