High power density electronics are severely limited by current thermal management solutions which are unable to dissipate the necessary heat flux while maintaining safe junction temperatures for reliable operation. We designed, fabricated, and experimentally characterized a microfluidic device for ultra-high heat flux dissipation using evaporation from a nanoporous silicon membrane. With~100 nm diameter pores, the membrane can generate high capillary pressure even with low surface tension fluids such as pentane and R245fa. The suspended ultra-thin membrane structure facilitates efficient liquid transport with minimal viscous pressure losses. We fabricated the membrane in silicon using interference lithography and reactive ion etching and then bonded it to a high permeability silicon microchannel array to create a biporous wick which achieves high capillary pressure with enhanced permeability. The back side consisted of a thin film platinum heater and resistive temperature sensors to emulate the heat dissipation in transistors and measure the temperature, respectively. We experimentally characterized the devices in pure vaporambient conditions in an environmental chamber. Accordingly, we demonstrated heat fluxes of 665 ± 74 W/cm 2 using pentane over an area of 0.172 mm × 10 mm with a temperature rise of 28.5 ± 1.8 K from the heated substrate to ambient vapor. This heat flux, which is normalized by the evaporation area, is the highest reported to date in the pure evaporation regime, that is, without nucleate boiling. The experimental results are in good agreement with a high fidelity model which captures heat conduction in the suspended membrane structure as well as non-equilibrium and sub-continuum effects at the liquid-vapor interface. This work suggests that evaporative membrane-based approaches can be promising towards realizing an efficient, high flux thermal management strategy over large areas for high-performance electronics.

We present a high-heat-flux cooling device for advanced thermal management of electronics. The device incorporates nanoporous membranes supported on microchannels to enable thin film evaporation. The underlying concept takes advantage of the capillary pressure generated by small pores in the membrane, and minimizes the viscous loss by reducing the membrane thickness. The heat transfer and fluid flow in the device were modeled to determine the effect of different geometric parameters. With the optimization of various parameters, the device can achieve a heat transfer coefficient in excess of 0.05 kW/cm 2 -K while dissipating a heat flux of 1 kW/cm 2 . When applied to power electronics, such as GaN high electron mobility transistors, this membrane-based evaporative cooling device can lower the near junction temperature by more than 40 K compared to contemporary single-phase microchannel coolers.

Water is often considered as the highest performance working fluid for liquid–vapor phase change due to its high thermal conductivity and large enthalpy of vaporization. However, a wide range of industrial systems require using low surface tension liquids where heat transfer enhancement has proved challenging for boiling and evaporation. Here, we enable a new paradigm of phase change heat transfer, which favors high volatility, low surface tension liquids rather than water. We utilized a nanoporous membrane of ≈600 nm thickness and <140 nm pore diameters supported on efficient liquid supply architectures, decoupling capillary pumping from viscous loss. Proof-of-concept devices were microfabricated and tested in a custom-built environmental chamber. We used R245fa, pentane, methanol, isopropyl alcohol, and water as working fluids with devices of total membrane area varying from 0.017 to 0.424 cm2. We realized a device-level pure evaporation heat flux of 144 ± 6 W/cm2 for water, and the highest evaporation heat flux was obtained with pentane at 550 ± 90 W/cm2. We developed a three-level model to understand vapor dynamics near the interface and thermal conduction within the device, which showed good agreement with experiments. We then compared pore-level heat transfer of different fluids, where R245fa showed approximately 10 times the performance of water under the same working conditions. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of a figure of merit extracted from the kinetic theory for evaporation. The current work provides fundamental insights into the evaporation of low surface tension liquids, which can impact various applications such as refrigeration and air conditioning, petroleum and solvent distillation, and on-chip electronics cooling.

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