Comparative Study of Thermal Performance of Longitudinal and Transversal-Wavy Microchannel Heat Sinks for Electronic Cooling

Liquid cooling incorporating microchannels are used to cool electronic chips in order to remove more heat load. However, such microchannels are often designed to be straight with rectangular cross section. In this paper, on the basis of straight microchannels having rectangular cross section (SRC), longitudinal-wavy microchannel (LWC), and transversal microchannel (TWC) were designed, respectively, and then the corresponding laminar flow and heat transfer were investigated numerically. Among them, the channel wall of LWC undulates along the flow direction according to a sinusoidal function while the TWC undulates along the transversal direction. The numerical results show that for removing an identical heat load, the overall thermal resistance of the LWC is decreased with increasing inlet Reynolds number while the pressure drop is increased greatly, so that the overall thermal performance of LWC is inferior to that of SRC under the considered geometries. On the contrary, TWC has a great potential to reduce the pressure drop compared to SRC, especially for higher wave amplitudes at the same Reynolds number. Thus the overall thermal performance of TWC is superior to that of SRC. It is suggested that the TWC can be used to cool chips effectively with much smaller pressure drop penalty. In addition to the overall thermal resistance, other criteria of evaluation of the overall thermal performance, e.g., (Nu/Nu₀)/(f/f₀) and (Nu/Nu₀)/(f/f₀)^1/3, are applied and some controversial results are obtained.