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This paper investigates the heat transfer and pressure drop analysis of micro grooved surfaces utilized in evaporators and condensers of a two-phase flow cooling loop. These devices utilize the vapor-liquid phase change to transfer large amounts of heat, and they offer substantially higher heat flux performance with lower pumping power than most liquid cooling technologies. Microgrooved surfaces, combined with force-fed evaporation and condensation technology discussed in this paper yield high heat transfer coefficients with low pressure drops. Our most recent results, aiming to test the limits of the technology, demonstrated dissipation of almost 1kW/cm2 from silicon electronics using HFE 7100 as the working fluid. In a compact two phase system, the heat generated by the electronic components can be absorbed by microgrooved evaporators and rejected through the microgrooved surface condensers to liquid cooled slots with high heat transfer coefficients and low pressure drops on the refrigerant side. In the case of air-cooling, the same microgrooved surface heat exchanger can reject heat with a heat transfer coefficient of 3847 W/cm2 and a pressure drop of 4156 Pa. These heat transfer processes have the added capability of being combined and used together in a self-contained system cooled either by liquid or air.

This paper presents experimental results from research investigating the heat transfer capabilities of microchannel surfaces using a novel force-fed boiling and evaporation technique. The evaporative surfaces being investigated consist of a series of parallel, high-aspect ratio, open topped microchannels. The different sample surfaces vary in channel density, channel aspect ratio, and channel width and have heat transfer surface areas up to ten times their nominal surface areas. Liquid enters the channels of the evaporative surface from above through a developed system of feed channels. This method organizes a liquid-vapor circulation at the boiling surface that results in dissipation of very high heat fluxes in the boiling/thin film evaporation mode. By using the force-fed boiling technique, nominal area heat transfer rates of 100,000 W/m2-K have been achieved with HFE-7100 as the working fluid [1]. In force-fed boiling, the many very short microchannels are working in parallel; therefore the feed pressure and pumping power are very low. This technique may prove valuable to a wide range of heat transfer applications, particularly for heat removal at high heat flux surfaces.