Non-isothermal liquid evaporation in micro-pore structures is studied experimentally and numerically using the lattice Boltzmann method. A hybrid thermal entropic multiple-relaxation-time multiphase lattice Boltzmann model (T-EMRT-MP LBM) is implemented and validated with experiments of droplet evaporation on a heated hydrophobic substrate. Then liquid evaporation is investigated in two specific pore structures, i.e. spiral-shaped and gradient-shaped micro-pillar cavities, referred to as SMS and GMS, respectively. In SMS, the liquid receding front follows the spiral pattern; while in GMS, the receding front moves layer by layer from the pillar rows with large pitch to the rows with small one. Both simulations agree well with experiments. Moreover, evaporative cooling effects in liquid and vapour are observed and explained with simulation results. Quantitatively, in both SMS and GMS, the change of liquid mass with time coincides with experimental measurements. The evaporation rate generally decreases slightly with time mainly because of the reduction of liquid–vapour interface. Isolated liquid films in SMS increase the evaporation rate temporarily resulting in local peaks in evaporation rate. Reynolds and capillary numbers show that the liquid internal flow is laminar and that the capillary forces are dominant resulting in menisci pinned to the pillars. Similar Péclet number is found in simulations and experiments, indicating a diffusive type of heat, liquid and vapour transport. Our numerical and experimental studies indicate a method for controlling liquid evaporation paths in micro-pore structures and maintaining high evaporation rate by specific geometry designs.

Heat dissipation from three-dimensional (3D) chip stacks can cause large thermal gradients due to the accumulation of dissipated heat and thermal interfaces from each integrated die. To reduce the overall thermal resistance and thereby the thermal gradients, this publication will provide an overview of several studies on the formation of sequential thermal underfills that result in percolation and quasi-areal thermal contacts between the filler particles in the composite material. The quasi-areal contacts are formed from nanoparticles self-assembled by capillary bridging, so-called necks. Thermal conductivities of up to 2.5 W/m K and 2.8 W/m K were demonstrated experimentally for the percolating and the neck-based underfills, respectively. This is a substantial improvement with respect to a state-of-the-art capillary thermal underfill (0.7 W/m K). Critical parameters in the formation of sequential thermal underfills will be discussed, such as the material choice and refinement, as well as the characteristics and limitations of the individual process steps. Guidelines are provided on dry versus wet filling of filler particles, the optimal bimodal nanosuspension formulation and matrix material feed, and the over-pressure cure to mitigate voids in the underfill during backfilling. Finally, the sequential filling process is successfully applied on microprocessor demonstrator modules, without any detectable sign of degradation after 1500 thermal cycles, as well as to a two-die chip stack. The morphology and performance of the novel underfills are further discussed, ranging from particle arrangements in the filler particle bed, to cracks formed in the necks. The thermal and mechanical performance is benchmarked with respect to the capillary thermal and mechanical underfills. Finally, the thermal improvements within a chip stack are discussed. An 8 - or 16-die chip stack can dissipate 46% and 65% more power with the optimized neck-based thermal underfill than with a state-of-the-artcapillary thermal underfill.

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In the past three decades, lattice Boltzmann modeling, which originated from the lattice gas automata method [9], has been developed into an efficient numerical approach to simulate and study different complex fluid flow problems ranging from turbulent [10,11] and multiphase flows [12-16] to thermal [17,18] and particulate flows [19,20]. For multiphase flows, there are in general four main categories of lattice Boltzmann models (LBMs): the Shan-Chen pseudopotential model [21,22], the free energy model [13,23,24], the colorgradient model [25], and the phase-field model [26,27]. Due to its simplicity and versatility, we apply the pseudopotential model which presents the intermolecular interactions with a density-dependent pseudopotential. The phase separation in this model is achieved by imposing a neighbor attraction between different phases; thus no interface tracking or reconstruction is needed. The original pseudopotential model suffers from the numerical instability when applied to large

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